The Laughing Wolf

I have always considered two commercial avenues to have been overlooked by investors. The first is mining. I have always believed that actual regular interstellar travel first begins with transport flights from mining operations. As with much of the exploration of the Earth, colonists will follow the mines. The second is solar energy collection. The sun releases enormous amounts of energy that are more easily harvestable outside the atmosphere.

Blogged it over on "Arcturus." Your characterization of the commercial-space subculture is deadly accurate. Every space-biz conference I ever attended was dominated by engineers who were obviously pleased, but just as obviously stunned, to learn that the venture I was involved in actually included marketers and such.

I would add that even those companies who have managed to raise large amounts of money have not been able to spend it effectively, that is, to come through with a viable product or service. I attribute this to inadequate project planning and poor or nonexistent risk management. Technologists tend to have blind spots, to put it mildly. When and if I revive the project I was working on, I don't intend to make those mistakes.

The problem with solar energy is delivering it back to earth. Microwaves are nice but it will be hard to sell it to the public.

The other problem with solar energy is economics. Wind power will be driving electrical energy costs down by a factor of at least 2 over the next twenty or thirty years. It will be quite some time before solar cells in space are cost competitive with wind power.

Tiger,
You've proven the article correct. Mining is the technology. What is the market? Companies don't build mines just because they like to. They build them because customers are willing to buy a product that needs the resources that can be made from the materials that have been dug up. The key point being the cost associated with digging it up. Iron is extremely plentiful in red clay but its so hard to get out that its not cost effective.

If you really want to talk about something that someone is willing to invest in then limit it to products or services that you would either write a purchase order for or pay for at a cash register. 'Mining' is not something you buy.

-MM

Where were you 20 years ago? Yes, you are exactly correct. The fascination with technology to the exclusion of all else is undeniable. Space nuts like ourselves are, to be blunt, mostly nerds. To do well in business and marketing you have to be socialable and most of us just aren't like that. Drawing space ships is more fun than talking to people.

In the late 80's I tried to put together a business plan built around the multi-billion dollar R&D budget of the chemical engineering industry. If you could convince them that the hard vacuum / free fall environment of low Earth orbit could be thought of as just another R&D tool you might get them to sign on to a regularly launched experiment module / return capsule. But there I go, discussing technology.

As for communism is Star Trek, I personally prefer to believe that given limitless cheap energy and resources and an almost completely automated workforce, the result is an economy where almost everything is so incredibly cheap to manufacture and distribute that the net effect is the equivalent of everyone being fabulously wealthy. No character in the shows/movies has ever said this. It's just what I tell myself so I feel better about their communist rhetoric.

I have wondered if technical progress might have caused the collapse of the dream of space exploration. In classical scenarios we need asteroid mining to deal with resource shortages. It has turned out to cheaper to use materials more efficiently and extract them from lower-grade ores. If technology had stayed at a 1960 level, we would use more minerals, extract less, and see major shortages. Asteroid mining might pay for a few materials and that would create economies of scale. At the same technology level, many of the communications, weather, or spy satellites would have to be manned. It might be cheaper to supply them from space so asteroid mining might pay even
for common materials. The power supply would have to be nuclear and we might even have an orbiting fast breeder reactor similar to "Blowups Happen."

On the other hand, in this timeline it's cheaper to extract minerals from the six hexillion tons of Earth, satellites don't have to be manned, and the people who might have given us the planets have given us the Internet etc. instead.

I'm reminded of the following quote from in "Bounded in a Nutshell" by Charles Sheffield:
"The first stars were coming out, twinkling softly through the mellow haze. Somehow they looked a little dimmer and farther away than before."

Mining != Commercial Space. Pardon the self-promotion, but I discuss this at http://avoyagetoarcturus.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_avoyagetoarcturus_archive.html#90331127.

Very nice article, but I think it misses a point about government involvement. In my mind, one of the main tasks of governments is to provide initial infrastructure - roads, electricity, water, sewage, etceteras. In a mature community, some of this might be privatized, but that is after the initial heavy costs. I believe the same thing should be true about space colonisation! Government efforts (not just NASA, but including ESA, NASDA, Russia and everybody) should pay for the establishment of an initial, self-sufficient colony. Mind you, just self sufficient and no commercial mining stuff or tourist hotels. Then, commercial ventures would be "additional cost only", and the business case much easier to sell. Problem is that the government will need to be convinced that there will be commercial ventures before financing the infrastructure, and commercial players need the government to commit to funding the infrastructure before finding the really nice and realistic business cases. Catch 22.
/Niklas

I am reminded of the vast rail network Britain constructed in India. The venture was a flop, mainly because the British built rail far beyond its demand.

A self-sustaining colony is one that produces enough to meet the demands of the colonists. One that is merely self-sustaining has little to nothing to offer in export. The towns and cities of colonial India, if more than self-sustaining, did not produce sufficient trade to warrant such a costly transportation network.

The difference between Calcutta and a space colony is that the latter has to be built from scratch by the colonizers. Since such a project entails a cost that would never be recouped (assuming the colony is merely self-sustaining), only a government or a charitable enterprise should build one. If this colony is going to play a role in space expansion, it must have some means of expanding its economic base after its initial construction.

What the vast majority of people think of when they "visualize" commercializing "space": Launch the raw materials, along with the processing facility and the crew to run it, spend a few days in orbit running the factory, then bring it all back home with a few kilos of finished product.

So long as that mindset controls the field, there is absolutely no way that space can ever be profitable.

Paradigm shift #1: The raw materials are ALREADY in space. We just need to gather them, and process them into the ingredients for whatever we intend to fabricate.

Paradigm shift #2: Building the factory on the planet surface, then pushing it from the bottom of the gravity well into orbit. As in #1, the raw ingredients are ALREADY in space. Boost into orbit a small materials processing facility, and BUILD the damn factory IN ORBIT--and LEAVE IT THERE. Then build another factory, and another, and another. And leave them ALL up there. (And not in LEO, but at the libration points--no reboosting required to keep it from falling into Tampa.)

Paradigm shift #3: Everything we make in orbit has to have a use on Earth. Horsehockey! We can make nearly everything we need on the surface, and do it much more cheaply than in orbit. Only some highly specialized compounds will ever prove more profitable when made in orbit. 99+% of materials fabricated in orbit should stay there, to be used to support permanent orbiting communities--and to be used in the manufacture of deep space exploratory craft, and starships as our understanding of advance propulsion technologies advances. Just about the only material that needs to come to the surface is the carbon nanotube cable that will be the path upon which runs the elevator to the stars.

If you want to generate enough clean energy to run the world, look to your own roof. Next time, put on solar shingles instead of standard shingles, and plug in to practically all the power you'll ever need. A dual-direction fuel cell (one that can use excess current to produce and store hydrogen, then run off that hydrogen when the sun isn't shining) is the only storage/generation device needed to complete the system.

And, finally--a comment thread that hits double digits! Laughing Wolf is on its' way!

Maybe the reason space companies all use the "field of dreams" business plan is not because the hundreds of bright people who start such companies are lazy, unimaginative, or too technically focused. Maybe it's because of an ugly reality: there is nothing commercially interesting in space. It will cost billions of dollars to build the infrastructure to make access to space even moderately cheap. Perhaps there is nothing up there worth billions of dollars.

Mining? Are you high? Material from mines is moved to factories on ships and trains, the cheapest form of transport around. There, it is refined into raw metal (or whatever), and moved, again on ships and trains, to factories that make things out of it. Does anyone imagine space transport costs dropping to levels comparable to rail and sea, any time soon?

Zero-G materials? At the current cost of orbital access, or even a hundredth of it, anything you can make in zero G, somebody else can make a cheaper, good-enough substitute for on earth.

Miracle drugs? See above. And it's a long shot that zero-G will be uniquely useful (or useful at all) to bioscience, anyway.

Energy? See the comment about mining. There's enough energy on earth, in petroleum, goal, NG, frozen subsea ice, oil-shale and oily sand, breeder reactors, and hydro, to make solar satellites uneconomical for centuries. The only way this works is if we seed asteroids with self-replicating machine macroorganisms (self-sufficient autonomous factory complexes), which breed, and produce solar cells and other materials, and build the solar satellites for us, in space, for just the initial investment cost. Of course, engineering and transporting the seed macros will cost billions of dollars, the payoff would be a century or two beyond the typical VC's time horizon, and there's no guarantee that any asteroid, or close cluster thereof, would contain all the diverse materials necessary for a macro to feed on (but maybe Io?). If someone could just sign up an eccentric billionaire... hey, somebody funded "biosphere II". Somebody could fund this. But not a hard-nosed investor.

Tourism is about it. And tourism is pretty iffy - the cost would have to drop a *lot*, and even then, there isn't really that much in space to see or do. Think about it - cruise ships stop at interesting places, they don't just stay at sea for two weeks. Once the novelty wears off and all us nerds go once, the space tourism industry might die of boredom. Unless there is something illegal on earth that you can do in space - if gambling can turn Las Vegas into a city, something like it could turn orbit (or the moon) into a tourist destination. But what? Drugs? Go to Amsterdam. Spam and porn servers? Go to Sealand. Brothels? Go downtown. Child-rape? Go to Thailand. There's nothing I can see.

Am I missing something?

-- Tristan

A correction to my month-late comment that no one is ever going to read:

When I said "there's not much to see or do", I was mostly thinking of LEO, and "near the earth" in general. There's fabulous geology on Mars, IO, Callisto, and other places. People go to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and the Alps; I can imagine them going to IO as well. Especially if there are ski runs, casinos, and plenty of fembot whores.

-- Tristan