socalguitar

Hi Will,

Have you ever conducted any analysis if Space Solar Power (for Earthbound distribution) could pencil out?

Disclosure: Your company Planet was featured in my book, Space Is Open for Business: The Industry That Can Transform Humanity

Well, I don't know how old you are. Um, but I would say, I think we'll see the genesis of it while I am alive, I would certainly hope that it actually starts to happen in a sort of repeatable and effective way. I think they'll probably be taking the resources to us in space first, not necessarily bringing them back to Earth. Um, but, you know, profitable. I guess that's TBD. There's lots of industries that kind of started relatively unprofitably, you know, so I would say maybe, hopefully, I'm giving some satisfaction to the answer there. And Keegan got a strong opinion on this one, do you think asteroid minds can happen within our lifetime?

Keegan commenting:

Almost certainly. Yeah. I'd say that you pretty much hit the nail on the head though that the profit generating aspect of it. We'll be carried out between companies and space. The most valuable thing you could get off of an asteroid. Yeah, right now when starships flying that really matter is water ice and really liquid oxygen. Musk was actually talking about this on that panel he was on on just the other day. And he was mentioning how most of what starship is carrying in terms of pupil or the refueling systems or any spacecraft is liquid oxygen about 78% to 22% for their propellant. So that's a lot of mass that is being brought up there. And this is I think, starship is probably going to enable the asteroid mining for water ice more than anything else because of that need. A big thing about that spacecraft is its system for using in space for Julie, you know, hypothetically that it doesn't work. So I can easily see, in space servicing companies trying to take advantage of that to harvest liquid oxygen at first, for topping off the tanks and a handful of satellites that need those systems

What's gonna be interesting to watch is most in satellites that have an onboard propulsion system tend to use on liquid oxygen dependent propellant propulsion systems, they either are electrically fueled, or have some kind of hypergolic mixture of some kind. And that means they tend to have a lot of really weird exotic birth balance on them. Whereas, you know, SpaceX and anything that's usually got a human on it or is going way out of the system. chemicals on a chemical booster uses liquid oxygen as its oxidizer. So what I think might be kind of weird watching this is, is an asteroid mining will end up being this kind of very, very niche use case for at least a few first few years of his life, to refuel a handful of spacecraft, and human ridden systems. What might be interesting to watch about all this thing I've been wondering about is if SpaceX can achieve the scale of launches that starship, you know, promises. We might see a weird situation where the industry switches over to a standard, you know, people mixture, you know, going from RP, one lox hydrogen mixes and different hyperbolic concoctions all all methane all the time scenario. And if that's the case, then it's not a lot of methane out of the solar system that we can really pull from there's we'd have to you might see a scenario where afterwards, it would be used, you know, primarily for resupplying oxygen stores on orbital depots, and then the tanker variant of starship might end up carrying almost exclusively methane to top off the tanks of those stations in orbit. So it's a, I got a little bit off tangent. But it's interesting to think about, about how economies that are still entirely theoretical, might not end up looking anything like how we think they're gonna look like, if you're talking about space mining for getting raw materials off of them. I think that'll happen. But I also think that it's going to be extremely used for the supply chains going on in space and in silicon and other rare earth elements to automated manufacturing stations that are making, you know, products that might also never actually set foot on Earth, at the space industrial boom, might need very localized to space itself for at least the first decade and change its life. So anyway, that got a little off topic there,

Robert, but I hope that answered the question

Robert replies: Yeah, it certainly did. Thanks, Keegan

u/Afireonthesnow hit the nail on the head

All companies trade stocks so you can try to do some trading. As space travel gets more accessible we should see more space travel that can increase the value of the stock as the first trips are expected to be of scientific and technical nature.

This is a question that the whole industry is trying to figure out.

There are a couple of studies that take a stab at this:

http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spaceflight/commercial-spaceflight/space-tourism-insurance-crash-space-station/

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1088&context=nlr

To achieve more scale industrialization. You need to have resource independence. That's the ability to you know get any resources you need relatively locally. Or if you can't source those, you need to have a supply chain to be able to bring any resources you need to carry out industrial operations at scale, either from the earth, moon or asteroids. Well, those supply chains don't exist, and probably won't exist in any real form for another optimistically five to ten years.

The first missions are going to be primarily about setting up our outposts, just to be able to conduct basic research.

How far are we from real life space industrialization?

So let's see here, we're gonna move over to the Reddit from yesterday.

and I'll probably bring my biz partner Keegan to join in for this next one too, but how far are we from real life space industrialization, this is from a live sanely.

And I think you know, the first thing is, What is your definition of industrialization? So, according to a, I just looked on the dictionary here, the dictionary definition is the large scale introduction of manufacturing, advanced technical enterprises and other productive economic activity into an area, society, country, etc. all some of these activities are in fact happening in low Earth orbit. Large scale, no. So maybe by that Definition not happening yet. But there are lots of emergent and nascent activities happening. It kicking you want to jump in here on on, on the sort of the timing of how far are we from sort of real life space industrialization? I think what they're talking about is just thinks maybe things done in a large scale sort of way.

Keegan Kirkpartrick joining:

this is a question that anybody in the industry industry worth his salt has been trying to figure out a way to answer for a while now, because it's so because the answer to the prize for answering that question is making a lot of money. But right now, I don't think anyone anybody could begin to estimate that because we're currently living in a period of this industry where technological advancements particularly for launch are happening at such a fast rate, that it's very difficult for anybody to really try to read the tea leaves and figure out you know, when the tea Point is going to come. If I was a, when you think about it, to achieve large scale industrialization, you need to have, if not resource independence, that's the ability to, you know, get any resources you need and relatively locally, you need to have supply chains to be able to bring any resources, you'd need to carry out industrial operations at scale, either from the earth the moon or asteroids while those supply chains don't exist. And even with starship with, even with elans you know, ambitious production rates probably won't exist in any real form or another, optimistically five years. I mean, really optimistically, probably both. Even with that, those first missions are going to be primarily about setting up outposts, just to be able to conduct basic research and see if it's even worth going after. Now. There will be a tipping point, industrialization was one of those, you know topics and he really read about about it. It is kind of fascinating how fast humans will actually do it once they figure out that they can. One of my favorite examples of this is, if you look at the history of Japan, during me, you know, first contact with Admiral Perry, when Westerners first showed up in Japan, there was not there was no industrialization of any kind. Why would there be they weren't, you know, connected to this broader, you know, European American, American, colonial, you know, infrastructure. But within half a century, they beat one of the largest navies on the planet. And we're well on their way to be being one of the most dynamic industrial countries the world. See. That story is not really unique in the history of humanity. So I think that it's going to take us at least a decade, to build out the supply chains to be able to make any possible industrial life at that point, it'll start to happen much more Faster we'll we'll go for it'll be like going from, you know, like, zero we're at right now to like, you know 5% very very, very low level, you know, production of low volume high cost wounds like 95 in the space of like a few years after that.