China appears to be accelerating development of a super-heavy lift rocket

Re:China appears to be accelerating development of a super-h... by rtkwe on Thursday September 20, 2018 @11:46AM (#18033315)

There's one place it could really shine and that's manufacturing space habitats if we could successfully put manufacturing in space for those it might tip the scales since it'd remove the launch cost from a large portion of the structure.

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Re:China appears to be accelerating development of a super-h... by Retric on Thursday September 20, 2018 @12:16PM (#18033557)

That’s a real chicken and egg problem. Why put that many people into space in the first place?

Tourism seems like an option, but if you can drop launch costs enough that it’s ‘cheap’ then sending stuff up is also ‘cheap’.

IMO, the trick to getting space mining to take off is not robots it’s the need for billions of tons worth of low complexity stuff in orbit.

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Re:China appears to be accelerating development of a super-h... by AJ007 on Thursday September 20, 2018 @02:11PM (#18034408)

Off world cryptocurrency mining and AI computations. A few hundred years from now this may not sound absurd.

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Re:China appears to be accelerating development of a super-h... by MisterTea on Thursday September 20, 2018 @02:39PM (#18034571)

Two hundred years from now, GPU's will still be scarce and expensive thanks to all the solar powered crypto mining satellites in orbit.

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