One thing I disagree with is the assertion that the US isn’t at the cutting edge of capitalist activities in space. Outside of the US, there are no fully private owned launch vehicles. All of the commercial (that is, for profit) entities are partially owned by one or more governments. In comparison, the US has the ULA, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX.
For example, EADS (which flies the Ariane 5) has significant ownership by the French government (according to Wikipedia, they control 27% of EADS via a half share of SOGEADE and another 2.25% directly controlled). Germany doesn’t own shares directly in EADS as far as I can tell, but they have demonstrated an interest in interfering in the affairs of EADS and its customers.
There are several for profit businesses in the former USSR that are partly or wholly owned by various governments in the area (particularly Russia and Ukraine). As far as I can tell, these account for all launches outside of the government owned Soyuz and Proton rockets. For example, the Dnepr rocket is run by a consortium half owned by Russia and half owned by Ukraine.
I stand corrected. Soyuz and Proton are both marketed by commercial entities which are partly owned (sometimes indirectly) by the Russian government. That means, as far as I can tell, that every rocket currently used in Russia has some commercial activity and is partially owned by Russia and some of its neighbors.
Unfortunately, before a capitalist space program is possible, there has to be an activity in space that would be worth doing in space. The “economic activation energy” of launching equipment mass into orbit is extremely high – the payoff needs to be some multiple of that.
What would that be? The resources available to us in space are variations on the theme of rock. Minerals just aren’t that valuable – and there is no way that Earth is ever going to “run out” of any given element on the periodic table for comparable energy investment, despite what the green-left seems to think. (Provided they don’t succeed in starving civilization of energy – then we’ll run out of everything and millions of people will die).
High vacuum is interesting – but low vacuum is sufficient for most processes – maybe some sort of fancy nanotechnology would require it.
Zero gravity is interesting – the question is is it important for anything?
Until you can either find a way to get things into orbit for $10/lb, or find something that’s worth a couple dozen times it’s weight in gold (especially since progress in other areas of industry are rapidly reducing the proportion of any given article’s material cost vs total cost), it will be hard to find a capitalist rationale for space exploration.
I have to agree with Karl. European and Russian commercial space is about as commercial an enterprise as GM is now.
And I have to say that after reading about the various ways in which Manber has played footsie with the Russians, I’m more than a little suspicious of whatever he advocates.
Aaron, one activity which we know is worth doing in space is comsats. That’s one place the feds could stand completely out of the way and allow US commercial space an opportunity to prove it’s viability.
Comsats are indeed important, and drive capitalist space efforts. But they don’t appear to motivate moving much out beyond GEO. Comsats won’t drive the kind of futurist/industrial/colonization effort most people seem to have in mind.
Zero gravity is interesting – the question is is it important for anything?
The usual answer is protein crystallization. The rate-limiting step in the process of figuring out the exact 3D shape and structure of a protein is getting the protein to crystallize, so you can do X-ray crystallography on it. It’s very dfficult, and the assumption has been that zero gee might be one way of making it more probable that tiny crystallites will grow.
It’s perfectly possible for the X-ray structure of a protein to be worth $billions.
Aaron, the commercial space “killer app” of cheap launchers and launches is doable and IMO the obvious place to start is comsats. That’s a specifically identifiable moneymaker. Beyond that, if you’re going to demand something else (like Gizmo X which creates a unique market and can only be manufactured in zero-g) you’re assuming a world where venture capitalists don’t exist.
The only large scale commercial activity in space that I believe is viable is tourism but only if launch costs come down by an order of magnitude.
There’s always space porn. Hey, don’t look at me like that. Porn drives all new technologies.
I think understanding what we can do to monetize space–via tourism, mining, industry, what have you–requires us to be able to go to various places in the solar system to check things out. Not gonna do that piddling around in LEO. Get us cheap access to orbit, and the rest will come. The private sector looks a lot more likely to accomplish that goal than any government, including ours.
In a way, I’m surprised Obama didn’t double down on Constellation. His administration is looking to be a failure, and you’d think he’d want to try to Kennedy up his reputation by being associated with something dramatic. I’m glad that he didn’t–this situation probably is better for private space industry development–but some sort of dramatic and hugely expensive “national endeavor” you’d think would fit his m.o.
Not gonna do that piddling around in LEO. Get us cheap access to orbit, and the rest will come.
Piddling around in LEO is the most promising commercial endeavour. Once we have that we will indeed have everything. Whatever NASA does becomes irrelevant after that. LEO is the single most important destination. On the commercial side everything else can wait and nothing is more important.
Sadly reducing cost to orbit soon would seem to depend on NASA getting out of the launch business and doing exploration on freely competing commercial launchers. It’s probably not possible to avoid work starting on an SDLV, but it may still be possible to cancel it before it flies. After all it would need exploration and without a spacecraft that will be impossible. Funding for an HLV would be a clear sign Obama isn’t serious about exploration.
I’m hoping that NASA’s coming irrelevance to manned space flight will get the government to be more friendly to private manned space flight, with the lifting of regulatory barriers, etc. I could even live with some seed funding, though it hurts my libertarian heart to admit it.
Development of commercial crew rotation capability and perhaps commercially viable space stations could and therefore should be a free side effect of maintaining a LEO-based space program. Whether that program itself is justifiable is another question.
Similarly reducing cost to orbit could and therefore should be a free side effect of government funded exploration. Again, whether exploration itself is justifiable is another question.
As a space enthusiast with strong libertarian leanings I’d be thrilled if space were opened up for mankind through exploration, but perfectly content if governments decided to stay in LEO or even if they got out of the manned spaceflight business altogether, which seems unlikely however. But as long as there is government funded manned spaceflight it would be wrong not to seek maximum commercial synergy.
The resources available to us in space are variations on the theme of rock. Minerals just aren’t that valuable
There is only one variation on the ‘theme of rock’ that is valuable enough: real estate.
We are currently hung up on the cost of access to orbit. But that’s a one time cost if you are going to colonize! The same with spaceships. If you design them to operate for centuries and never go below orbit in a major gravity well the cost of putting them in orbit becomes insignificant.
Many designs for SSTO from Earth that seem feasible and might get to orbit from our gravity well have been blueprinted in the last half century. So we should be able to make a moon or mars lander today that would work fine for 99% of the bodies in our solar system.
There’s no reason they couldn’t be fully gas and go reusable with a long useful life. They can be sent empty to any orbit in anticipation of a spaceship full of people to follow up.
Expensive fuel from Earth may be needed to get the ball rolling, but other cheaper sources would certainly follow.
Yes, we want to get cost to orbit down, but it’s not the limiting factor. The value of real estate makes it insignificant and over time as we develop that real estate it will only be more so. The ball is rolling, but so slow it’s hard to perceive. That will change this next century.
there is no way that Earth is ever going to “run out” of any given element on the periodic table
Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.
Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.
Was that supposed to be relevant somehow?
Yes, we want to get cost to orbit down, but it’s not the limiting factor.
If you want large-scale activity in space or exploration let alone both you pretty much need lower cost to orbit. How many people could you launch to space commercially today? How many with NASA’s budget?
Orbit to orbit transfer ships are interesting to me. I’ve given them a bit of thought. Do you guys have any ideas on how to overcome these problems?:
Orbit to orbit ships depend on reaction mass – Hydrogen, the main ingredient for most propellants, is hard to come by in the inner solar system apart from Earth.
You’d have to go as far as Ceres before you start getting ice deposition on asteroids in circular orbits. Comets in highly elliptical orbits are very hard to approach – something on the order of 10-20kps dv to match speed.
I suppose you could gas them up with aluminum powder/LOX propellant – you could produce enough of that from the moon. That has it’s own slew of technical challenges – pretty low Isp (200-220ish sec)?, and the alumina exhaust eats your nozzle throat over time.
The moon may have some water – whether it is enough to justify using it as reaction mass over the long term, or whether you want to conserve it to help run lunar bases, I don’t know.
—————
“Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.”
What I meant was that if you are going to launch X mass of equipment to the moon to mine lithium/titanium/aluminum/whatever, and spend something like 10s to 100s of kJ/kg shipping it back, with the price of the equipment, launches, ect – then that business isn’t going to compete well with a business that spends the same amount of equipment, and possibly even more energy since they don’t have to worry about launches, sifting extremely diffuse deposits here on earth for trace minerals.
Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.
Was that supposed to be relevant somehow?
Yes. The original statement used absolute statements like “the word is never going to run out”.
Well, never is a long time. While 640kb may have been reasonable amount at the time when mr. Gates made that statement, it looks laughable today.
I will try to make my point with an example: just 10 years ago, very few people cared about worldwide supply of tellurium.
After First Solar commercialized their CdTE cells ( and loads of people made a fortune after their IPO ) suddenly this question started to matter. Why ? Because they are the first guys to offer solar photovoltaics at grid parity prices, and lower.
Can anyone project the worldwide demand for Tellurium 20 years into the future ? How about 200 years ? No. The demand can entirely disappear because something fundamentally better comes along ( CIGS ? ) or we can hit a peak, and henceforth be constrained in our progress.
( Note that both 20 and 200 years are infinitely shorter time spans than “ever” )
IMO the relevance from 640kb quote, ( and countless others ) is obvious foolishness of such projections into the future. Time can prove these wrong in ridiculously small spans.
One thing I disagree with is the assertion that the US isn’t at the cutting edge of capitalist activities in space. Outside of the US, there are no fully private owned launch vehicles. All of the commercial (that is, for profit) entities are partially owned by one or more governments. In comparison, the US has the ULA, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX.
For example, EADS (which flies the Ariane 5) has significant ownership by the French government (according to Wikipedia, they control 27% of EADS via a half share of SOGEADE and another 2.25% directly controlled). Germany doesn’t own shares directly in EADS as far as I can tell, but they have demonstrated an interest in interfering in the affairs of EADS and its customers.
There are several for profit businesses in the former USSR that are partly or wholly owned by various governments in the area (particularly Russia and Ukraine). As far as I can tell, these account for all launches outside of the government owned Soyuz and Proton rockets. For example, the Dnepr rocket is run by a consortium half owned by Russia and half owned by Ukraine.
I stand corrected. Soyuz and Proton are both marketed by commercial entities which are partly owned (sometimes indirectly) by the Russian government. That means, as far as I can tell, that every rocket currently used in Russia has some commercial activity and is partially owned by Russia and some of its neighbors.
Unfortunately, before a capitalist space program is possible, there has to be an activity in space that would be worth doing in space. The “economic activation energy” of launching equipment mass into orbit is extremely high – the payoff needs to be some multiple of that.
What would that be? The resources available to us in space are variations on the theme of rock. Minerals just aren’t that valuable – and there is no way that Earth is ever going to “run out” of any given element on the periodic table for comparable energy investment, despite what the green-left seems to think. (Provided they don’t succeed in starving civilization of energy – then we’ll run out of everything and millions of people will die).
High vacuum is interesting – but low vacuum is sufficient for most processes – maybe some sort of fancy nanotechnology would require it.
Zero gravity is interesting – the question is is it important for anything?
Until you can either find a way to get things into orbit for $10/lb, or find something that’s worth a couple dozen times it’s weight in gold (especially since progress in other areas of industry are rapidly reducing the proportion of any given article’s material cost vs total cost), it will be hard to find a capitalist rationale for space exploration.
I have to agree with Karl. European and Russian commercial space is about as commercial an enterprise as GM is now.
And I have to say that after reading about the various ways in which Manber has played footsie with the Russians, I’m more than a little suspicious of whatever he advocates.
Aaron, one activity which we know is worth doing in space is comsats. That’s one place the feds could stand completely out of the way and allow US commercial space an opportunity to prove it’s viability.
Comsats are indeed important, and drive capitalist space efforts. But they don’t appear to motivate moving much out beyond GEO. Comsats won’t drive the kind of futurist/industrial/colonization effort most people seem to have in mind.
Zero gravity is interesting – the question is is it important for anything?
The usual answer is protein crystallization. The rate-limiting step in the process of figuring out the exact 3D shape and structure of a protein is getting the protein to crystallize, so you can do X-ray crystallography on it. It’s very dfficult, and the assumption has been that zero gee might be one way of making it more probable that tiny crystallites will grow.
It’s perfectly possible for the X-ray structure of a protein to be worth $billions.
Aaron, the commercial space “killer app” of cheap launchers and launches is doable and IMO the obvious place to start is comsats. That’s a specifically identifiable moneymaker. Beyond that, if you’re going to demand something else (like Gizmo X which creates a unique market and can only be manufactured in zero-g) you’re assuming a world where venture capitalists don’t exist.
The only large scale commercial activity in space that I believe is viable is tourism but only if launch costs come down by an order of magnitude.
There’s always space porn. Hey, don’t look at me like that. Porn drives all new technologies.
I think understanding what we can do to monetize space–via tourism, mining, industry, what have you–requires us to be able to go to various places in the solar system to check things out. Not gonna do that piddling around in LEO. Get us cheap access to orbit, and the rest will come. The private sector looks a lot more likely to accomplish that goal than any government, including ours.
In a way, I’m surprised Obama didn’t double down on Constellation. His administration is looking to be a failure, and you’d think he’d want to try to Kennedy up his reputation by being associated with something dramatic. I’m glad that he didn’t–this situation probably is better for private space industry development–but some sort of dramatic and hugely expensive “national endeavor” you’d think would fit his m.o.
Not gonna do that piddling around in LEO. Get us cheap access to orbit, and the rest will come.
Piddling around in LEO is the most promising commercial endeavour. Once we have that we will indeed have everything. Whatever NASA does becomes irrelevant after that. LEO is the single most important destination. On the commercial side everything else can wait and nothing is more important.
Sadly reducing cost to orbit soon would seem to depend on NASA getting out of the launch business and doing exploration on freely competing commercial launchers. It’s probably not possible to avoid work starting on an SDLV, but it may still be possible to cancel it before it flies. After all it would need exploration and without a spacecraft that will be impossible. Funding for an HLV would be a clear sign Obama isn’t serious about exploration.
I’m hoping that NASA’s coming irrelevance to manned space flight will get the government to be more friendly to private manned space flight, with the lifting of regulatory barriers, etc. I could even live with some seed funding, though it hurts my libertarian heart to admit it.
Development of commercial crew rotation capability and perhaps commercially viable space stations could and therefore should be a free side effect of maintaining a LEO-based space program. Whether that program itself is justifiable is another question.
Similarly reducing cost to orbit could and therefore should be a free side effect of government funded exploration. Again, whether exploration itself is justifiable is another question.
As a space enthusiast with strong libertarian leanings I’d be thrilled if space were opened up for mankind through exploration, but perfectly content if governments decided to stay in LEO or even if they got out of the manned spaceflight business altogether, which seems unlikely however. But as long as there is government funded manned spaceflight it would be wrong not to seek maximum commercial synergy.
The resources available to us in space are variations on the theme of rock. Minerals just aren’t that valuable
There is only one variation on the ‘theme of rock’ that is valuable enough: real estate.
We are currently hung up on the cost of access to orbit. But that’s a one time cost if you are going to colonize! The same with spaceships. If you design them to operate for centuries and never go below orbit in a major gravity well the cost of putting them in orbit becomes insignificant.
Many designs for SSTO from Earth that seem feasible and might get to orbit from our gravity well have been blueprinted in the last half century. So we should be able to make a moon or mars lander today that would work fine for 99% of the bodies in our solar system.
There’s no reason they couldn’t be fully gas and go reusable with a long useful life. They can be sent empty to any orbit in anticipation of a spaceship full of people to follow up.
Expensive fuel from Earth may be needed to get the ball rolling, but other cheaper sources would certainly follow.
Yes, we want to get cost to orbit down, but it’s not the limiting factor. The value of real estate makes it insignificant and over time as we develop that real estate it will only be more so. The ball is rolling, but so slow it’s hard to perceive. That will change this next century.
there is no way that Earth is ever going to “run out” of any given element on the periodic table
Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.
Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.
Was that supposed to be relevant somehow?
Yes, we want to get cost to orbit down, but it’s not the limiting factor.
If you want large-scale activity in space or exploration let alone both you pretty much need lower cost to orbit. How many people could you launch to space commercially today? How many with NASA’s budget?
Orbit to orbit transfer ships are interesting to me. I’ve given them a bit of thought. Do you guys have any ideas on how to overcome these problems?:
Orbit to orbit ships depend on reaction mass – Hydrogen, the main ingredient for most propellants, is hard to come by in the inner solar system apart from Earth.
You’d have to go as far as Ceres before you start getting ice deposition on asteroids in circular orbits. Comets in highly elliptical orbits are very hard to approach – something on the order of 10-20kps dv to match speed.
I suppose you could gas them up with aluminum powder/LOX propellant – you could produce enough of that from the moon. That has it’s own slew of technical challenges – pretty low Isp (200-220ish sec)?, and the alumina exhaust eats your nozzle throat over time.
The moon may have some water – whether it is enough to justify using it as reaction mass over the long term, or whether you want to conserve it to help run lunar bases, I don’t know.
—————
“Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.”
What I meant was that if you are going to launch X mass of equipment to the moon to mine lithium/titanium/aluminum/whatever, and spend something like 10s to 100s of kJ/kg shipping it back, with the price of the equipment, launches, ect – then that business isn’t going to compete well with a business that spends the same amount of equipment, and possibly even more energy since they don’t have to worry about launches, sifting extremely diffuse deposits here on earth for trace minerals.
Yes, and 640kb ought to be enough for anybody.
Was that supposed to be relevant somehow?
Yes. The original statement used absolute statements like “the word is never going to run out”.
Well, never is a long time. While 640kb may have been reasonable amount at the time when mr. Gates made that statement, it looks laughable today.
I will try to make my point with an example: just 10 years ago, very few people cared about worldwide supply of tellurium.
After First Solar commercialized their CdTE cells ( and loads of people made a fortune after their IPO ) suddenly this question started to matter. Why ? Because they are the first guys to offer solar photovoltaics at grid parity prices, and lower.
Can anyone project the worldwide demand for Tellurium 20 years into the future ? How about 200 years ? No. The demand can entirely disappear because something fundamentally better comes along ( CIGS ? ) or we can hit a peak, and henceforth be constrained in our progress.
( Note that both 20 and 200 years are infinitely shorter time spans than “ever” )
IMO the relevance from 640kb quote, ( and countless others ) is obvious foolishness of such projections into the future. Time can prove these wrong in ridiculously small spans.