The previous limiting factors for launching stuff off-world were weight and size. Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore).

With Starship, most of this goes away. It becomes possible to launch bigger, heavier (that is, cheaper) stuff to space. Still high-tech stuff, for sure, but engineers will be able to make more tradeoffs, because there won't be a need to optimize everything to be small and light.

Okay, I get the margins get more cushy. But one could see it being something like space launch getting 10x cheaper and that maybe translates into 3x demand for satellites. The first earth observatory was worth an astronomical amount of money, but the hundredth or thousandth is far down the tail of diminishing returns.

I just really wonder how much money can they make off of all of this even in the best case scenario. There isn't an infinite demand for putting things up into space.

There are demand inflection points. If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap. If Starlinks starts making all telecom providers obsolete then that'd also present something radically different and a huge amount of revenue. But I don't think they're able to do that either

I feel the primary reason people stopped caring about space after Apollo is because there are simply insufficient economic incentives.

The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining

Everything else is on taxpayer dollar

> If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap

Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.

That will never work. You'll spend more time traveling to and from the remote launch facilities than you would flying conventionally from a nearby international airport. Destinations would also be severely limited by technology export laws; maybe it could be arranged for a handful of friendly nations / strategies allies like Japan or Australia, but most of the world would be scratched off the list.

When Shotwell and Musk talk about stuff like that or Mars colonies, they're hyping the company to attract more talent. If you loom at what they're actually building, it's all satellite launchers.

Someone downvoted you because you have hit a nerve. Don't mind those people.

I don't know, Dallas to Sydney is a 17 hour flight now. If it takes 30 minutes on a rocket from Texas you have 16 hours to do everything else and you'll still get there faster.

If that was just intended to forecast costs, then it’s a good analogy. But I thought SpaceX went further than that. This Adam Something video provides some amusing coverage of the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI

I don't know what to tell you but that is basically the equivalent of a kickstarter scam.

This whole thread is wild.

> Person who sells snake oil speculates that snake oil cures cancer.

Reminder that the issue with snake oil was that most of it was counterfeit, not from the kind of snake that produced the oil with actual benefits.

> The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining

The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly.

The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.

I'm no expert but I think Rome was always growing but never achieved ultimate profitability. Yesterday I was considering how the Italian renaissance was fueled by the materials left over from Roman overbuilding. The price Rome originally paid in labor was an enormous savings to the renaissance builders.

I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.

How do you define profitability for a entity like Rome or its current equivalents, let's say the USA, China and maybe Russia?

As Italian, we're still profiting from what the Romans built and from their general hegemony.

There's always an element of time to money, so your argument and the parent's don't contradict in that the romans might have not been profitable in the near term yet what they created was very profitable in the long term

Mostly on the idea that as the Roman Empire expanded its currency was devalued by precious metal content. That sort of pattern signifies to me decline. I understand that the currency may have been just keeping pace with the efficiency of trade. It seems to me that if trade was as efficient as Rome was hoping it would not have collapsed.

Another way to look at it is that the empire ran into a labor shortage and contracted back to a sustainable size.

> how space can be profitable

Figuring out how to get large nearly pure metallic asteroids in earth orbit would go a long way in figuring out that profitability.

The problem is that there seem to be plenty of easier to solve problems that would have an immediate effect on the dignity of human existance.

I love the challenge of space technically. My concern is confusing technical challenges with profitable/worthy pursuits.

I say this as a collector of inertial guidance systems.

If you want to build spaceships to fly around the solar system, being light still matters a lot and inflatable modules are a great idea.

That’s because your constraint is delta-V which is expressed in terms of the mass you are moving around. More mass requires more propellant and energy… which means more mass requires more mass.

If they use Starship to bootstrap mining, refining, and manufacturing in space, then this ceases to become a problem. At that point we're talking about how much cargo Starship can move, not how much infrastructure.

> Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore).

Another good example is JWST, which required an elaborate (and therefore risky) "unfolding" process. The costs of such approaches seem somewhat self-reinforcing: a failure would be very costly, so it's worth spending more on validation and testing; that extra expense would make a failure even more costly, justifying even more spending on testing! (In that sense it's similar to the tyranny of the rocket equation: having to carry more propellant in order to propel that extra propellant!)

There are manufacturing processes that benefit from microgravity (e.g. growing protein crystals for the pharma industry, producing semiconductors, etc).

Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.

Semiconductors and microgravity, can you elaborate on what part of the production process would be improved?

There's a paper on the subject here: https://osf.io/d6ar4/

Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:

> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude

For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).

I do somewhat doubt that the economics would work out. Silicon wafers are expensive, but I'm not sure if the price is currently higher than that of launching a bunch of sand to low earth orbit.

You wouldn't launch sands to LEO, but the equipment used for bootstrapping a mining operation on the moon or asteroid.

I think the point is you'd be able to build products in space that you cannot build on Earth for any cost currently.

You can 3D print organs in space that you can't in Earth, there was just a successful trial of printing a knee meniscus.

https://www.issnationallab.org/redwire-space-3d-prints-menis...

What fraction of machine time is currently spent pumping wafers down to molecular-beam vacuum? What fraction of machine mass is dedicated to holding that vacuum? Vibration isolation would also be much easier. Not sure if these are enough to matter, let alone enough to justify a rocket, but maybe the math can be made to work.

> An offworld base would need the financial backing of nation states.

It really depends on what we mean by "offworld base". There is extensive literature on how this might be done "on a shoestring budget". Start here: https://www.marssociety.org/concepts/mars-direct/

You could cut costs a lot if you used robots rather than humans to build things. I'm not sure how the Tesla bot is coming along but you never know.

I believe an idea that circulated early on in the media in regards to SpaceX, whether rumour or real, is that Musk was planning to fund basically do a reality TV-like show - and be able to fund the colony on Mars through that; who on Earth wouldn't want to watch the first humans land on Mars, live on Mars - and what "influencers" might volunteer to be some of the first to "report on" the experience, as entertainment - for better or worse.

He's also more recently said the revenues from Starlink, aiming to be at least $5+ billion monthly recurring revenue, will fund his Mars colony.

The reality is though he's now tapped into accessing the full abundance of the universe, and he's at least 1-2 decades ahead of everyone else, in part due to the synergy of his various projects: Starlink, Boring Company, Tesla, etc - all are technology that he'll need for Mars - so he can funnel revenues/sales back into those companies]; and Musk understands exponentials of scaled paths, and so him being 1-2 decades ahead, with the synergy of the multiple companies he owns/controls, every year he has the chance to leapfrog ahead another decade of any other competition.

If we diverted 10% of the DoD budget, we could launch 800,000 tons, about 5,300 starships, per year.

Hard to fathom the damage to society that Elon could do if we funnel 10% of our defense budget through his companies.

Accelerating the transition to sustainable energy and expanding access to space is damaging to society how exactly?

Musk is collaborating with fascists. Here’s an example: https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-speak-russian-conference-17...

Attending a conference in Russia is collaborating with fascists? This comment is hysterical in every sense of the word.

> Attending a conference in Russia is collaborating with fascists?

There’s no private business in Russia, almost all economy is state owned in practice. That particular conference is organized by Sberbank.

By speaking at the conference, Musk is directly collaborating with Russian government.

I don't want to be rude, but I'd say if you fall for that then you're a sucker.

Tell me which of Elon's companies would exist today without heavy government subsidies or largesse?

He is a modern day Ross Perot. No more, no less. Maybe he wants to make the world a better place - but only if he can get extravagantly wealthy on US taxpayer dollars doing it.

He's obsessed with Mars because it represents the fattest international government contract that ever existed.

What about the cost of the actual cargo? I don't think Moon base infrastructure is cheap.