Once upon a time, I heard a man talking about the costs of manufacturing products in space. He said that if someone could launch straw into space and magically turn it into gold that he would lose money doing it. I’m well aware of the fact that people often throw out arbitrary statistics to “prove” a point but is there any validity to this? Who would have said such a thing? Just curious.
I’ve made the assumption that this process converts one pound of straw into one pound of gold. With that provisio and this 4 year old report on launch costs it seems that for you to turn a profit you would pretty much need your straw-to-gold conversion to take place in Low Earth Orbit without any equipment and without a return vehicle.
This of course depends on launch costs not having dropped drastically over the last 4 years, and that I didn’t trip over the numbers when calculating a terrestrial gold price of >$6000.
Despite quite a few years of intensive research, sending up stuff into space still hasn’t gotten much lower than $10,000 per pound. Given that gold is roughly $400 an ounce and there are 16 oz in 1 lb, that comes out to be roughly $6400/lb for gold. So, yes, sending up straw to make into gold would still be a money losing proposition.
Gold is usually measured in troy ounces, of which there are 16 in a troy pound, but only 14.583 in a normal pound. Which means the straw-to-gold-in-orbit scheme is about 9% further from being viable. And does the $10k/lb price include re-entry? Probably not.
Another nail in the coffin of Rumplestiltskin’s Low-Earth Orbit Transmogrifications!
Maybe they’ll do better with a governmernt grant.
Note that the big expense is in the launch costs. If you use material that’s already in space, then the costs should be much lower (though it’s difficult to say how much lower, in practical terms, since this has never actually been done). On the other hand, if some much cheaper method is developed for launching materials, then this could also make space manufacturing much cheaper. And the third point is that if you want your manufactured products to end up in space anyway, then you’ll still be launching that weight, regardless of whether it’s raw materials or finished product, so it might make sense to assemble a satellite or probe in orbit.
Right. But apart from a few dead satellites what material can be found in space (setting aside for the moment the need to convert it to gold)?
In low-Earth orbit, dead satellites are about it. But if you allow yourself to go past that, you have far, far more than is available on the Earth. One could reasonably get from a single asteroid more nickel, titanium, irridium, and platimum than is found in the entire crust of the Earth (in fact, over half of the planet’s accessible nickel came from a single asteroid which hit the Earth ages ago). Iron is even more abundant in asteroids, which is significant given how many things we make out of steel, and oxygen and other light elements are also available.
While it’s true that asteroids (even the close ones) are much further away from low-Earth orbit than is the surface of the Earth, it’s nevertheless much cheaper to move material from an asteroid to LEO (or to anywhere else, for that matter), since asteroids have much lower gravity and no atmosphere.
Currently you’d have to lift any fuel required from earth though. So step one for any reasonable utilization of extraterrestrial resources ought to involve setting up production capacity for some sort of fuel. Or using solar sails… isn’t there an experiment on that coming up?
Solar sails are for when you get out of the gravity well. Currently, the only solution we have to getting into orbit is chemical rockets. Other alternatives are nuclear powered rockets, scrapped due to public demand and space elevators which are still decades away from feasability.
But private companies, of course, are really looking to push the costs way down. While it’s unlikely to see much immediate improvement, it’s probably a growth industry, and there are a lot of fascinating designs out there.
One of my favorites involves a laser-containment system, which fires a ship upward riding on a laser stream. The laser guides the ship, and you need one monstrous beam to do it, but it’s mathematically possibly. It’d probably need its own nuke reactor to put enough out, though. I’ll see if I can’t pull out the details. One neat trick with it is that the containment chamber can be made so it self-corrects and thus can’t be tip over on take-off.
Aside from that, the old giant-cannon railgun plan seems feasible.