What use is space?

Great Debates
1

We have had a recent thread on sky-hooks, and there have been threads in the past focusing on other methods of space travel, or getting into space in the first place, and often, we talk about cost, and how it costs less to do it this way or that.

In this thread, I do not wish to concentrate on those concepts, fascinating as they may be. In this thread, I wish to find something to do up there that is worth it. It doesn’t matter much if you get launch costs down to 1% of today’s cost, if there isn’t anything profitable to be done when you get there. Mining asteroids sounds like a great idea, but who is going to buy the materials in space?

So, what profitable industries can be done in space, that cannot be done, or cannot be done as efficiently, as they can be on Earth?

The two tentative ideas I have is organs and computers.

I have seen ideas of growing organs in microgravity. We can kind of do this on earth, but you have to put too much scaffolding into the mold for the resulting organ to be very functional. In space, you only need to hold it enough it doesn’t drift around, and so can use far less than you would need if you were fighting gravity.

The other thing I have seen as a possible space industry is chip fabrication. You can grow purer and larger silicon wafer crystals in microgravity, and there may be other advantages as well.

The way I see it, if we start growing organs in space, then that actually is an economical activity, because it doesn’t matter how much it costs to make a life saving organ like a heart, someone will be willing to pay it. Then as industry in space matures, costs can come down, and such things can reach reasonable costs that can be borne by the average consumer.

Once there is an economically viable reason to be in space, then other stuff becomes more reasonable as well. If you can make organs or chips cheaper by importing the material from the moon or NEAs than you can by having it shipped up from the planet, then suddenly, asteroid mining and moon bases make economic sense.

So, would these industries get enough of a boost from being done in space that they would incentivise people to invest in space? What other industries would get a great enough benefit from space to tantalize our earthbound bodies?

2

Satellites: communications / navigation / remote sensing / etc.

3

Well, yeah, but I am talking about manufacturing capabilities and other things that would maybe require, but certainly assist, having an economical use to put people into space as well.

4

Besides being where I keep Earth, which is where I keep my apartment, which is where I keep my stuff…

…I’ve heard that there’s a reasonably good chance that in space we might be able to mine minerals or other materials from asteroids and comets that have become scarce or expensive to acquire on earth. Whether the profitability from that will be able to justify the costs of hauling ourselves and our equipment up there to fetch them will depend largely on how cheap we can make the process of getting up there.

5

But, in space, you would be able to hear an organ.

[sub]Sorry, didn’t read far enough.[/sub]

6

Getting stuff up into space takes a lot of resources. But once you’ve got the infrastructure built, you’ve got access to lost cost materials and energy with no environmental concerns. It’s a great place for manufacturing.

And shipping finished products back down to Earth is a lot cheaper than shipping them up from Earth.

7

Consider the question in this way…why did Europeans need to leave Europe and explore the new world? I mean, basically everything that was in the new world, including gold, was already available in Europe. Initially, most manufactured goods and services still came from Europe. So, to the people at the time in Europe, what was the real need to expand outward? Or, think further back…to our ancestors in Africa what was the point of expanding outward to other areas? I mean, at the time it’s not like there wasn’t any space available in Africa for the few thousand Homo Sapiens (or Homo Erectus earlier).

That’s really the answer. What’s in space? Same stuff as here, really. But basically infinitely more. Do we NEED more? Well, not today. But when the population expands it might be nice to have access to new resources. This leaves aside the other reasons it might be good to expand out…such as, oh, extinction level events that could wipe out our species. Not sure how to quantify the cost of losing all the humans, but seems rather expensive. And we know it WILL happen if we just hang out on this one rock until something nasty this way comes (or we do ourselves in). Oh, in the long run, we know that, eventually, entropy will get us anyway, but for my part, I think a few billion or a few hundred billion years down the road for our distant ancestors (or electronic versions of them) is better than the alternative. The bonus is we will probably take other species with us to, giving them a shot at lasting longer than they would otherwise stuck on this rock.

How did those new world colonies work out in the end? :wink: Really, the discussions on launch cost are the key…there are plenty of things we could do in space from commercial exploitation to science, but until we can figure out how to get people and stuff into space economically it’s not going to happen. Right now we are at the equivalent of having a flimsy raft…we aren’t going to be able to economically exploit the new world until we have something more akin to the early caravels for space. A workhorse that we can use relatively cheaply to do the job.

8

Here’s the thing, I agree that ultimately, we need to get into space, for many reasons, but if nothing else, for humanity to expand. I will be disappointed if we do not eventually become a galactic species.

The problem with making analogies to previous exploration is that it was much much cheaper to go to the new world than it is to go to space. And when you get there, there is already air, water, and possibly even food, or at least the conditions to easily grow it. In space, you have to bring or build everything that you need for survival.

Yes, we need to get launch costs down too, but we first need to find an actual use for space industry that cannot be done on earth that would justify that initial bootstrapping of getting people and equipment into space in the first place. Tourism and science only get you so far, and I do not think far enough.

That’s why I am asking what sorts of industries would be exclusive to space, and worthwhile enough to justify their cost. Biomedical and Electronic manufacturing are the two most profitable industries I know of, using the fewest resources to create the most highly dense value possible, and it does seem as though they could get some level of benefit from the microgravity environment, and maybe even the easy access to vaccuum you get in space.

Would these industries actually get a benefit, and enough of one to justify the cost? Are there any other industries that would be profitable enough in space to justify the costs of bootstrapping a general space industry?

9

New Jamestown, now with space cannibalism! Maybe wait for the second Mars colony.

10

I’ve read a few reports about the extreme value of Hydrogen-3 on the moon, for use in nuclear power. That is probably the only resource that could be economically exploited in the near term. My expectation is that we will have an energy revolution first, where energy becomes so abundant and low cost, that many new types of manufacturing make space travel possible. Then we’ll start to reap the rewards of having a near limitless supply of elements from space.

11

Near infinite energy and matter is quite useful.

12

If it weren’t for space, everything would happen HERE.

13

[QUOTE=k9bfriender]
The problem with making analogies to previous exploration is that it was much much cheaper to go to the new world than it is to go to space. And when you get there, there is already air, water, and possibly even food, or at least the conditions to easily grow it. In space, you have to bring or build everything that you need for survival.
[/QUOTE]

It wasn’t cheaper when you look at the relative wealth and power of the two groups. The US today (and Europe, Asia, etc etc) is so vastly more wealthy and powerful compared to Spain and the rest of Europe during the exploration and colonization that it’s difficult to even quantify it. We COULD build space industries and even colonies on the Moon at least for as much relative wealth and power as Spain et al used to create and maintain their colonies and empires…and for vastly more potential wealth and resources.

No, there isn’t food in space…we’d have to grow it. But we can do that…we already know how to do that…it just takes power. Plain old fission would be enough, if you could get folks to calm down and allow it. We can actually do that easier than it was for the European colonists to create the agriculture infrastructure they created to support and sustain their colonies. Radiation is a more potential show stopper than food or water or air is…but then again, the probability of death for Europeans coming to the new world was ridiculously high. The crossing alone took a toll, let alone the rigors of colony life (and freaking simply being alive back then wrt ordinary diseases, food contamination and the rest). Looked at in relative terms, space today is no more difficult or dangerous than that…and no more expensive in relative terms, though cost to benefit wrt the vast wealth of our civilization sort of mitigates it’s utility to date. Which is why all the talk about better, cheaper ways to get into orbit. Once you solve THAT problem, though, and the problem of shielding from radiation it’s a different equation. Put a mining colony on the Moon, for instance, and getting raw materials or finished goods back into space is much easier. Same with asteroid mining.

Today? Probably not, though there are serious companies looking into the feasibility of space based industries even now. But the problem is still mainly the launch costs…it’s insanely expensive to get stuff into orbit per kilogram. Figure out how to drop the costs from $10’s of thousand per kilogram to $1000’s…or better yet $100’s…and the equation completely changes. It’s hard to even explain all of the things you can do if you can just get into space cheaply and all the resources available. You could move a lot of your heavy industry to the Moon (long ass video about industrializing the moon), say…no worries about environmental damage there! And those skyhooks? Work great there with no atmosphere. You could, with materials available today, build a space elevator on the moon…or, hell, just mass drivers to shoot stuff into orbit. There is a nearly infinite (from our current perspective) amount of resources in the solar system as well. Hell, I’ve seen videos talking about stuff like star lifting(another long ass video).

14

We are not in disagreement. The links in your post are all grey to me, in fact, I posted the skyhooks video in your thread about skyhooks a couple days ago.

If you are a follower of his videos, you might recall a recent one where he points out that we have the plan:

  1. Get into space.

  2. ???

  3. Profit.

I have no doubt that once we have viable communities in space, and economical manufacturing in space, then space will be developed more quickly, as it will need less and less stuff shipped up from Earth’s gravity well.

So, my post is more on the step two question, what industries would be useful and profitable enough to get people to invest in expanding our presence and capabilities.

It’s great that we can do better astronomy from the moon, but what’s that actually worth, dollar figure wise? People may be willing to pay millions of dollars for a ride around the moon, but how many, and is it enough to actually create a viable industry around?

I had heard for years that chip manufacturing could get some benefit from the weightless environment, would it be enough for intel to invest in space technologies?

I recently saw something on biomedical research, where researchers were interested in growing human organs and tissue in weightless environments, would that be viable, and economical enough for pharmaceutical companies to invest in expanding our infrastructure into space?

The problem with space is that it is really expensive to get to, and that only starts coming down with economies of scale. You don’t get economies of scale until you have a good economical reason to build them up, as even if you have much “cheaper” launch costs, you are still talking in the mid to high six figures to put a person into space.

The problem with asteroid mining is that it is almost pointless to mine asteroids for materials to use here on earth, the main benefit to asteroid mining is that the materials are already there in space, and so do not have the expense of hauling them out of Earth’s gravity well in order to build or manufacture in space, but first, we need to start building and manufacturing in space for that to be worthwhile.

Governments could spend the necessary resources to bootstrap us into space, but that is looking less likely, though China is making some interesting strides. It really does seem to come down to needing the private sector to discover a MacGuffin in space that is worth going after. What that MacGuffin is, is the point of this thread. I proposed biomedical and electronic manufacturing, but I do not know whether those would be all that viable, nor whether they would be economical. I am also not sure if there are any other industries that would benefit from having a more involved space infrastructure.

Once we have one self sufficient space colony, I can relax in the knowledge that our eventual filling of the galaxy and beyond is inevitable, but until that time, I will be constantly worried about our species dying out here on this rock.

15

[QUOTE=k9bfriender]
If you are a follower of his videos, you might recall a recent one where he points out that we have the plan:

[/QUOTE]

Sure, but he goes on to give several things that WOULD or COULD be profitable for step 2 (which is actually a bunch of sub steps). The biggest one though is 1…get into space (cheaply and in a cost effective way).

Mining is an obvious one. Manufacturing would be another one. Assuming colonies you have trade as well, impacted by both of those. The biggest thing is that, if you can get into space cheaply and affordably then you have access to orders of magnitude more potential resources, many of which are pretty scarce on earth. And you don’t have to worry about environmental damage, by and large, since the Moon or an asteroid don’t really have an environment to impact. Which get’s into the potential for moving stuff that DOES damage our environment off planet, which is a ‘use’ with a lot of perhaps non-monetary value to the people who live on this rock.

16

It’s Helium-3, actually.

That wiki page is an interesting read. Assuming we can get fusion power plants up and going, the U.S. alone will need something like 50 tons of Helium-3 per annum. We simply don’t have enough of the stuff on Earth; we have to go out and get it.

The moon is the closest source, but even then it’s a limited resource. A more viable (and almost inexhaustible) source would be the four gas giants in our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus.

Of course, an even simpler idea is not to require the element in the first place; just make fusion power work with another, more common, material. Hydrogen to helium may work just as well as helium-3 to helium-4. It’s the “just make fusion power work” section that we’re struggling with, though; it’s possible that it just can’t work as well with any other source (or at all, for that matter, but smart engineers are working on it).

17

[QUOTE=pieceoftheuniverse]
That wiki page is an interesting read. Assuming we can get fusion power plants up and going, the U.S. alone will need something like 50 tons of Helium-3 per annum.
[/QUOTE]

That sounds like a lot, especially when you consider you have to mine over 100 tons of regolith to get 1 ton of Helium 3, but we kind of get a twofer with this, because the same places that the Helium 3 are (usually in crates and other shaded places) there are all sorts of other goodies there as well…water ice for a start, but also all sorts of asteroid based resources and materials, some of which are also pretty rare on Earth. My understanding is there are 1000’s or even 10’s of thousands of years worth of H3 on the Moon…IF we ever get nuclear fusion up and working, of course (and if that turns out to be the optimal fuel). Getting it back to Earth also shouldn’t be a major challenge once the infrastructure is built…and the advantages for fusion certainly mean it will have a huge benefit to cost ratio in our favor. Again…assuming fusion can be made to work. That’s the kicker.

18

Withoutspaceourwordswouldruntogether.

19

“i can relax”? “constantly worried”? Is the future of the species really a day-to-day worry for you? I think the happenings in space are interesting and cool, but I don’t regularly feel any concern over the small chance that some event will obliterate mankind.

20

Do I fret every minute of the day over it? Of course not.

But do I think about it at all? Yes, yes I do. Probably on the order of at least once a day, more if I am participating in a thread about space.

By constantly worried, I do not mean that I am always thinking about it, and worrying about it, but that when I do think about it, there are few things that make me optimistic that we will not die out on this rock.