Which resources are cheaper to get from space? I’ve only ever seen hand waiving arguments, never any math.

That depends entirely on the price; things are very different when it costs $20k/kg to orbit (basically nothing is worth that) vs. $20/kg to orbit.

Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries

While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.

Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.

But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.

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petrocrat 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."

Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.

The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.

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somenameforme 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again.

The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.

And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.

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lokar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)

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somenameforme 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As far back as the 60s NASA had already laid out technical plans for how to get humans to Mars. The Moon was never meant to be the destination, but a brief stepping stone to greater things. So we can thank Nixon for setting humanity's progress back by half a century. The ISS and Space Shuttle both were driven largely by these initial plans.

But the current claustrophobic nature of the ISS was, again, not the destination. There was a grand scheme of in-orbit refueling, fuel depots, and much larger scale space architecture. Something of the ISS scale was intended as a short jumping-off point, a workers' tent analog. But our progress stalled out and the workers' tent is what we were left with.

The point I'm making here is that space in the era we're stepping into is very unlikely to look much like the one we're leaving. This is even more true as the price drops because private industry will be able to play a major role. There will be no Nixon to just cancel everything out of concerns for his political career.

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ben_w 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech.

Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome.

If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading

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lokar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

How far out would you say that is? Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?

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ben_w 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> How far out would you say that is?

Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less.

But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age.

> Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?

IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn

The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.

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lokar 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That was my general impression. They did amazing work to totally change launch costs (with more on the way). But launch was a limited market. The low costs have and will grow it, and starlink will grow it, but not enough to justify this value.

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somenameforme 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In investing it's critical to think about things probabilistically, rather than trying to just guess the future. "Fooled by Randomness" is a great book on this. In a scenario like this it's especially critical, because in the case where Starship fully delivers and the next great frontier of humanity opens up, the upside potentially is practically infinite.

E.g. imagine in a bet you think there's a 99% chance of something being worth $1 and a 1% chance of it being worth $1 million. What's a fair price? It's a simple calculation - 0.99 * 1 + 0.01 * 1,000,000 = ~$10,000. That's you setting a price of $10k on something that you fully expect to be worth $1 99% of the time, and still coming out just fine.

So the actual debate should not be on 'guess the future' but rather on the odds of Starship delivering and estimating the impact this would have. And I think to many the answers are fairly easy - 'very nonzero' and 'very big.' It's akin to the NVidia/Apple stories, except in this case it's being somewhat priced into the market to begin with because it's somewhat more probable, and easier to foresee.

	▲	lokar 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The problem with that argument is the failure to reasonably factor in time. If you take an expected value approach (quite reasonable in general) looking into the future you need to discount for time or everything goes to infinity.
	▲	ben_w 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		While the point is valid, the upside still isn't practically infinite; humans intuitively do something close to hyperbolic discounting for future returns (I assume evolution did this because of the possibility of black swans but it isn't talking). The easy version of this is to value a company over the next 20 years of profits. The first half of that time horizon, I don't see much changing at all outside of Starlink subscribers. They've only got ~5 Mars launch windows in any given decade, and while their design philosophy is great for LEO where launch windows are daily, launching rockets to see what fails is exactly wrong for Mars. OTOH, now to 2036, there's at least a chance AI goes boom. Perhaps even one of Musk's AI. Great for the overall economy (at least right up until it changes the economy so much that capitalism looks as obsolete as feudalism looks today, which may or may not be in that horizon), but even if it's the next industrial revolution, there's so much competition there that I expect everyone's profit margins to be almost nothing. And conversely, if any one of them does appear to be massively dominant, in comes an anti-trust case (who remembers Standard Oil?) Same with rockets, though a "rocket boom" is perhaps an unfortunate phrasing. He finds a way to make more money than expected, just like he's already doing with Starlink? Great. Industrial espionage is a thing, and even if it wasn't, China's not got a problem with the state funding businesses to simply re-discover everyone else's secret sauce. US companies and residents may find themselves restricted from using the fruit of that work, but most of the world will just buy what's cheapest. Still, as I said, your point is valid.