So long as humanity is limited to throwing high velocity gas oot the back of rockets to get around the solar system, we’ll be limited by access to volatile material. Spacex is betting on CH4 and oxygen, nuclear rocket designs (NERVA) used hydrogen, although they could use pretty much anything. Earth is in a peculiar position such that the delta V of getting to orbit will also get you to anywhere else in the solar system fairly quickly.
So if launch to LEO is cheap, fuel will be a large proportion of cargo imo. Note solar sails and some other propulsionless designs negate this requirement.
> Earth is in a peculiar position such that the delta V of getting to orbit will also get you to anywhere else in the solar system fairly quickly.
Tangent:
One of my favorite answers to the Fermi paradox (not mutually exclusive with others) is that much of the life in the universe is stuck at the bottom of huge gravity wells ("super Earths") that make space flight immensely difficult and expensive, making the development of a space industry far less likely.
It's a variant of the rare Earth hypothesis. Not only might Earth be rare for its stability and long-lived biosphere but also for the fact that it's large enough to hold onto a thick atmosphere and water but not so large that you can't get off it with relatively benign (compared to higher energy alternatives) chemical propellants. Increases in the mass of Earth would make space launch exponentially not linearly harder.
Getting anything non-trivial off a super-Earth would probably require nuclear or hybrid (e.g. LANTR) rockets, which are problematic for ground launch in a biosphere. They'd also be a lot more costly.
There are alternate sources of propellant in the solar system. Lifting it out of Earths gravity well is relatively expensive. But once you have enough of it, you could start transporting propellant from elsewhere in the solar system and start stockpiling it in strategic orbits around various objects in the solar system. Once you can do that, you'd minimize the launch weight from earth to be able to get to a LEO fueling point and use the weight savings for more interesting cargo.
One industry that could emerge quickly is that of asteroid mining. There are plenty of interesting asteroids with precious metals, water, and other resources. Right now the cost of getting to these asteroids, mining them, and transporting the mined goods back is so expensive in delta-v that it has not been done yet despite several companies having been active planning for this for quite some time.
So, SpaceX getting their star ship going might be a big deal.That enables us getting stuff into space and that enables us bootstrapping mining and construction activity in orbit. Plenty of science fiction books have been written on this. There's no shortage of ideas here.
My big fear with asteroid mining is that if you can move an asteroid to Earth orbit, you can also smash it into any capital city or military base on Earth.
Which means that this capability is a weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles!
I don't think the world will let this be run on the honor system. So I expect space travel to become extremely tightly controlled once we get close to this tech level.
A relatively small number of nuclear missiles is enough to wipe out human civilization. There's no such thing as "a weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles" in terms of Earth-focused weaponry. And we've done very little if anything to prevent countries from acquiring and maintaining nuclear missiles. If we let North Korea have nukes, what makes you think we would try to stop countries from developing space capabilities?
Also, if you have rocketry that's efficient and high-tech enough to push distant space rocks into deadly orbits, building a good ICBM arsenal is almost the same thing. Although dropping rocks at 50km/sec does save you having to build nuclear warheads, and you'd worry less about them getting shot down by missile defense.
But global-scale strategic deterrents do get kind of academic past a certain point. There are plenty of ways for a nation-state actor to end the world if they really want to.
I'm thinking a few decades in the future, when there is probably settlements on the Moon and Mars, and an asteroid mining industry that finds valuable metal asteroids and sends them to Earth orbit, maybe by attaching solar powered rockets to them.
In that world, any asteroid mining operation can destroy a lot on Earth, even by accident.
The delta-v maps show the minimum needed to get from one place to the other. In order to get from one place to another more quickly, you’ll need larger delta-v’s at the ends of the trip.
Even though the rest of the solar system is within reach, we don’t want to send humans to Pluto and back on 20-year missions.
A 20 year mission to Pluto would be unsuccessful without cryogenic or otherwise science-magical-sleep system. I cannot imagine a single set of humans who could spend 20 years together, without any way to leave the small space of a ship, and not absolutely lose their minds.
That long of a trip means we just end up sending absolute lunatics and/or small pieces of chopped up lunatics after the inevitable murders.
The ship would need to be very large - artificial gravity and adequate shielding for radiation and impacts would need to be provided, as well as an insane amount of redundancy and survivable abort routes. Attempting to do it with technologies we have, even with infinite funding, would be next to impossible without incurring in unacceptable risks.
For some time an assumption - a rule of thumb of a sort - was that chemical rockets can get people comfortably around within Mars orbit, and to get further away we need something better. That "something" is likely not solid-phase nuclear engines, with Isp about twice as good as LOX/LH2, and probably not gas phase nuclear engines... but thermonuclear engines, which get closer to feasibility with advances in thermonuclear energy field. A thermonuclear engine could be more attainable than a thermonuclear electrical plant, and cheaper LEO access could be a big part of enabling technology.
Having engines like that we may talk about much faster trips to Pluto and back.
NERVA or other Nuclear thermal rockets are actually fairly low ISP compared to ION drives. A solar panel + inert gas gets you anywhere in the solar system.
The real issue is what’s the point? The economics of asteroid mining gets much worse if you consider bringing vast quantities of say gold back to earth would tank the value of gold.
We can significantly expand mining of common elements like copper and iron, the demand simply isn’t there.
Over 5% of earths crust is iron, aluminum is over 8%, we really aren’t running out of them.
Amos stuff is more rare, but for scale roughly 700 million metric tons of copper has been mined out of 2800 million tons of copper discovered in economically viable concentrations. With perhaps another 3500 million metric tons in undiscovered but economically viable mines.
Metal prices rise and fall quite a bit. They have fairly inelastic demand because raw material prices are a small fraction of total costs. A skyscraper may need a lot of steel but in total it’s still a small fraction of total costs. Even just making steel from iron is rather expensive.
A great deal of copper is used in new construction, but the number of outlets in the average new home isn’t going up because raw copper is suddenly 1/3 the price.
I'm thinking/dreaming about a world where prices are orders of magnitudes lower. Is there some advantage to make tin cans out of palladium rather than tin? Then we can just do it because the metal cost is the same!
A bit of utopian fantasizing, sure. But even cutting end user prices in half should have important effects.
Unfortunately, I think that’s more from sci-fi taking place in space rather than some inherent advantages to asteroid mining. 100% automated manufacturing process in space seem like a minimum requirement, but presumably doing the same thing on the ocean floor gets you to the same place.
I have been thinking about this and what I really hope we do is build a fully automated colony in space. Making it livable for humans is a huge pain in the ass, but if we restrict the scope to just sustaining robots then it becomes easier.
Energy is easy: Solar panels. There is also repairs which might be trickier. Need to mine for materials and refine them into spare parts.
Once you have a self-sustaining colony you could use it to assemble useful stuff. Luxury goods for terrestrial consumption. Or you could use it to build a stage-2 colony that is suitable for humans. Or maybe rockets and stuff to keep expanding into space.
Does anyone have some thoughts on where all the funding and market is coming from in this new private space industry? I've seen a ton of these companies popping up, and I'm not sure I quite understand where all the demand and money is coming from outside of government contracts.
While space is always cool and "sexy", I've been wondering if there's some analog model that could work for ocean tech, particularly tech that allows us to better protect and explore the ocean.
On a personal and technical level, I view the ocean as far more important to human understanding and survival than space.
Private internet satellites is going to be a big market. Russian space program collapsing for quite some time and only being escalated recently. SpaceX paving a way for profitable private space business.
Satellite internet seem to me to be a niche thing, at best. It's extremely 'cool' but in countries rich enough to buy satellite internet high speed wireless infrastructure is nearly ubiquitous. Countries without the cash to fund wireless infrastructure also don't have the cash to pay for satellite internet. On top of that some customers who might otherwise have the resources and the need live in autocratic countries that may not be entirely happy with internet that isn't entirely within their control. It seems like that basically limits your possible customers to western style democracies in under-served rural areas or a few outliers like maybe marine applications, etc.
As a current Starlink customer, I can assure you there's plenty of market outside of the "nearly ubiquitous". I live just 30 miles from a small city where the average home is served by 400Mbps cable, yet until Starlink came along I was stuck with Hughesnet, which is reminiscent of a particularly high-latency 56k dial up connection. There are a couple thousand similar households just in my county.
Trust me, I empathize as I am in a similar boat. But we are a small, small market comparitively. We are expensive to service, low density, and low profit. Pretty much the definition of a niche
> view the ocean as far more important to human understanding and survival than space
Funny enough, I always thought calling groups of coördinating satellites “constellations” belies their true complexity. They’re fleets. When you think of fleets of satellites in orbit, the need for ancillary services becomes obvious. (On your narrower point, we are seeing major breakthroughs in oceanography and maritime surveillance from these constellations.)
Presently the biggest challenge confronting the private space industry is creating a market and creating demand. This is no different than any other industry, however.
They are 100% at the mercy of SpaceX accepting their payloads. If SpaceX decides to create an in-house competitor, they are purely and simply screwed. And SpaceX will create an in-house competitor if Impulse Space is profitable.
So they are also betting on either anti-monopoly legislation being set-up (SpaceX is a monopoly because no other launcher can match their pricing), or that a SpaceX competitor emerges (which could easily be a decade out).
It's very similar to the relationship between Apple or Microsoft and developers for their platforms. In those cases if your product makes sense as a component of the OS, or is a table stakes application that the platform vendor can't leave to third parties, then you're in trouble. Outside that, they actually need you to enrich and expand their ecosystem.
Until somebody copies what SpaceX is doing. SpaceX might be first to succeed with this but they are inspiring lots of others to try as well. That's already happening, there are lots of space startups and some are getting some rockets to orbit even. Any patents SpaceX might have (and I think Elon Musk is actually not big into that) would eventually expire and might be licensed in between. I don't think that's a blocker for competition.
If e.g. Boeing wants in on the action, they need to start moving. The main problem with that has more to do with Boeing's inertia than with SpaceX trying to stop them from doing anything. SpaceX has actually been pretty vocal and open about their plans. And by Boeing/NASA standards they are not even spending that much on this. The only thing stopping Boeing from competing here is Boeing being Boeing. Other companies are less encumbered by their own ineptness and will no doubt start figuring things out for themselves.
I'm 95% sure that SpaceX refusing to accept payloads from Impulse Space in order to charge for their own orbital maneuvering vehicles would already be illegal as exclusive dealing.
It still frustrates me that Swarm was basically given a free pass after their illegal satellite deployments[1]. They broke both the law and good cultural norms around space tech in a meaningful way, barely got a slap on the wrist, and then ended up being acquired for quite a good amount of money. The FCC commissioner even stated that "The size of the penalty imposed is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior."
Move fast and break things shouldn't have been acceptable for an organization operating in this area, and that Swarm had no meaningful repercussions for doing so should be a black mark on the org and the executive running it for a long time. I'm certainly hoping others don't use their model as a blueprint.
For another view on how this will change things, consider the delta-V map of the Solar System [1]. As an example you need 45km/s to reach Saturn, roughly 20% of that is just spent getting to Low Earth Orbit.
Now consider the long-term trend in the payload cost (by weight) of getting to LEO [2]. This is why people such as myself are so bullish on spaceX (despite quite reasonable qualms about Elon Musk as a person). The impact this has had and will continue to have on reducing this number cannot be overstated.
But all of this are still interim steps and we can potentially get the payload to LEO cost under $10/kg. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of this, I strongly recommend Isaac Arthur's Upward Bound series [3], I consider the ultimate end to this to be Orbital Rings [4].
Even if you don't believe there's a reason for humans to go to space en masse (which I disagree with), this will greatly impact life on earth, for example with space-based solar power collectors.
> For another view on how this will change things, consider the delta-V map of the Solar System [1]. As an example you need 45km/s to reach Saturn, roughly 20% of that is just spent getting to Low Earth Orbit.
Actually, it's 19km/s less than that. You want your destination to be Low Saturn Orbit, not Saturn. You've included the 19km/s that it takes to launch from Saturn to low Saturn orbit. It's even less again if you can aerobrake at Saturn.
This is one reason I'm quite bullish about some of the 'old space' companies, like Boeing, Northrop and Lokheed. They may be losing out in launch systems, but they stand to make a fortune building a lot of the cargo Starship is going to launch. Someone's going to need to build all these satellites, probes, space stations, etc.
The same applies to ESA, do they actually care about building rockets, or is the interesting work to be done now all up there in orbit and beyond?
Starship isn't the end of innovation in space technology and infrastructure. It's not game over, it's the beginning.
Yeah, maybe. But those in the old guard are used to building expensive, one-off things. I'll agree they can have better margins on what they already do.
SpaceX benefit most from stuff which can be mass-produced. Customers who have use-cases which can be massproduced, will benefit the most from SpaceX.
Another commenter mentioned on the perils of that too - SpaceX owns the ride, so they hold the keys to the Kingdom.
I think they have the opportunity, whether they take it or not is up to them.
I don't worry about SpaceX dominating all aspects of space development, because their launch capacity will far, far exceed the volume of products they can reasonably develop to fill it. We're talking about the ability to deliver thousands of tons of payload to orbit per month. It's going to take many companies, many product ideas, many business models and industrial sectors to fill that capacity.
It's a bit like how in the early days of the iPhone Steve Jobs imagined that Apple would develop all the apps for the phone, sometimes along with business partners, as they did with the early versions of Google Maps. His colleagues realised that the platform had the capacity to run a vast ecosystem of apps across many use cases and business models they couldn't even think of yet. The only way to realise it's potential was to carry other people's stuff, in that case apps, in SpaceX case cargo.
Yeah, I'm also curious about this approach by folks like ESA. Even NASA with their SLS monstrosity.
Imagine what you could do with an extra $4B per year in support for missions - it would be amazing. There is no way SpaceX can scale for that. You can't build a telescope targeting starship (maybe using starship has the frame and keep starship up there)? Or tons of other interesting ideas (spacesuits of a number of styles etc).
SpaceX is a bit unique, Elon wants to get to space and is crazy about Mars. But LOTS of other stuff to do, and he doesn't seem to hung up about what he is launching (see OneWeb and all the other space com businesses he's launching).
Mueller talks about “ pharmaceuticals, or materials, or semiconductors” production shifting to space. Can anyone expand on this please? What aspects of these industries is better done in space? How large (in revenue) are those portions of those industries? Thanks!
Building organs in microgravity, a potentially crucial ingredient to make the process work. From what I've seen this is the most realistic near future application.
"When you're 3D-printing a tissue culture on the ground, there's a tendency for them to collapse in the presence of gravity," he says. "The tissues require some sort of [temporary, organic] scaffold to hold everything in place, especially with cavities like the chambers of a heart. But you don't have those effects in a micro-gravity environment, which is why these experiments have been so valuable."[0]
Although I do think, taking human progression in the limit, moving to self sustaining manufacturing in space, using local raw materials (asteroids or otherwise), and dropping products back down to earth will be the natural progression. Space offers what earth does not -- infinite resources, infinite space(heh), infinite energy. Delete scarcity and what remains is purely a logistics problem.
From what little they've said, it's a pretty safe bet that their propellant mix is:
* Safer to handle than traditional hypergolics, which are crazy toxic and therefore difficult and expensive to work with. (This is what they mean when they say that the propellant is "green".)
* Something that doesn't require cryogenic storage. That stuff is great for launching from earth, but not great for storing longer-term in satellites. (And they will need to store it over a longer term in order to provide de-orbit, which they say they will.)
If I had to take a guess, I'd guess a hydroxylammonium nitrate monopropellant. It was tested in orbit by NASA a few years ago and apparently worked great:
So if launch to LEO is cheap, fuel will be a large proportion of cargo imo. Note solar sails and some other propulsionless designs negate this requirement.