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

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.

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.

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

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