Jeff Bezos Is Selling $1B a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I was trying to find difference between blue origin and F9 and found these old articles. [0] [1]
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[0]http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9793220/blue-origin-vs-sp...
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a18711/blue-or...
You do realize the 'old' rocket companies haven't gone anywhere. Yes, Space X:s success is astounding but let's not get myopic about it.
For SpaceX reuse and the price saving are already a reality, ULA and Arianspace are only in the concept phase for these things. Their rockets are only planned for first flight in 2020 and maybe reuse a couple of years after that.
The only reason Arianspace can compete at all is that they don't amortize the development of the rocket.
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6838079/india-mars-mangalyaan
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/15/india-launch...
The reason I'm not very gung-ho right now is because there is, just maybe, a future in which ISRO isn't just "one of the space agencies that have made it into orbit", but as important to the future of space as NASA was a decade or two earlier, and getting there involves not just doing good work, but being ambitious at the scale of SpaceX and such. ISRO is being funded well right now, but if they can't "make it" in the next decade, with NASA in a slightly precarious position and private companies with no history of going into space doing all manner of remarkable things, they are going to miss this shot, and that can be dangerous in a political climate where the "can such a poor country really afford to go into space" types might drown out more reasonable people and shutter things for good. I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.
Good promotional material attracts talent: I seem to remember someone from SpaceX saying "our webcasts are actually recruitment propaganda", and, well, they work! Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?
[0]: Around 1.5 tons, and, no, I'm not discounting the challenges of actually releasing that many microsatellites.
Which is why they made this video highlighting the Indian women who powered the mars mission.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbi...
they are all "management looking".
You do realize that ISRO is the third space agency in the world to have a mars capable launch right ? and did it at a tenth the cost ? The only others are US, EU and Russia.
We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.
Oh yes we are.
But Jugaad isn't exactly frugal engineering. Its more like badly put together hack.
Also frugal engineering only helps when you have specific goals and you wish to achieve only them. Larger culture of quality consciousness, innovation, precision engineering etc requires larger investments in time and money. Which is why you might eventually do a moon mission, but landing a man on moon will be that harder.
The real problem now for ISRO is mars mission and moon mission satellites are basically the advanced low hanging fruit versions of space work, not easy to pluck but if you jump a little harder you absolutely can. Anything beyond this like say landing rovers, especially big rovers will be very very hard. Or manned missions for that matter or something like a Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, or the Voyager missions. You not only need bigger rockets, but the engineering and technology challenge there is just a whole lot degree higher. Getting to that requires building the equivalent of MIT's and Harvard's in India.
I think the USA or the western world can build the equivalent of PSLV quite easily. They just don't because there isn't much engineering challenge left in building a slightly larger ICBM. And then compete for profits there. While you can make the same money easily by selling satellite services.
Also though we should be proud of a diverse culture. Very few women are actually in any hard engineering roles there. Most are collect and report kind of jobs, or some management position, or some other desk jobs. Although that definitely counts as being a part of the project. But most of the real hard work that builds competency still sees very little involvement from women. A lot of people come in through reservations and remain dormant because of pension and other government benefits.
Anecdata: I have a friend who's wanted to work in this area for as long as I've known him (which is at least 7 or 8 years now), and he's far happier to try and find work outside India -- knowing how hard it is to find aerospace engineering work in, say, the US, with all the "weapons technology" trouble that makes gaining citizenship a requirement -- or, failing that, work at some Indian startup rather than ISRO. To be very honest, that's sad, and it's definitely not an exception. I don't see why that has to be the case: I've accepted with some resignation that math and theoretical physics/CS never will be, but space can definitely be -- for lack of a better word -- sexy. Our Lord and Savior[0] Elon Musk isn't the only one who can (or should) do it.
[0]: /s
Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.
This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy.
This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run.
>>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.
ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards.
Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't.
Eg:
They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?"
From: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms
Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.
>>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?
Why not?
Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?
> Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.
Exactly my point. There was a ton of nonsense around the time of Chandrayaan about whether or not it was right to spend money on such things "when people were starving": in case it wasn't clear, I think that's bullshit. And I'm worried about it coming back, and actually doing some serious damage this time.
> Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?
As some of the other replies to your comment also point out: my problem is not the Hindi. If we launched a space telescope, I fear it'd end up named "Mahakashdoorbeen" or something. Why not something less boring than "Mars Vehicle" (which is what Mangalyaan translates to)? Remember, a 19- or 20-year-old is still young enough to be attracted to shiny things, so moralizing about how this is "useless nonconstructive criticism" doesn't help. The name doesn't increase the maximum pressure the rocket can survive, but it gets you people who can.
> Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.
That's very interesting: it's reminiscent of Erlang, in a way. Launch a ton of cheap missions, expect some to fail, work on reducing the failure rate while not crying because a couple went up in smoke. I could see this turning into something big if they took it farther in public.
> ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere.
Why does it need to stay that way? It seems you know more than me about how ISRO works, so this just makes me sadder.
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It seems from the downvotes that people think I'm one of the rabid "India is a toilet" types that surface on /r/worldnews whenever there's some good news about India. I'm not: it's just I think that more Indian leadership (for lack of a better word, again) in space (and STEM more generally) is something to legitimately care and feel proud about.
Wanting the end without any focus on means will take us no where.
Like I said in another comment. Focus on development of human resources. Good quality and uniform standard of education for everyone without discrimination. Building high quality higher institutions of the standard of Harvard's, MIT's and Stanford's is what will prepare your next generation of citizens who will build the next space stations and space telescopes.
In short solve social and political problems first. Western perspective on India is right though. You can't have starving people, who don't have access or means to basic hygiene or sanitation, coupled with society deeply in social problems won't take you too far.
What you have at ISRO is despite these problems and initial inertial of the initiatives created by a leader like Jawaharlal Nehru. Unfortunately off late the country's politics hasn't much talent to offer to the challenges and needs of our times.
I would like to tangentially note that NASA couldn't have done what it has done without the post-WWII Operation Paperclip, in which the USA literally stole Germany's rocket scientists.
That says something.
If the best of the world want to come to some country- You have to be doing a lot of right things to build such a ecosystem.
Calling the Mars mission "Mars Vehicle" in any language is stupid.
One of the ways they made it for only $75M was the spacecraft was only 3,000 lbs, so they could use a relatively small rocket to launch with. But the Falcon 9 can put 8,000 lbs in martian orbit for only $65M. That doesn't include the spacecraft, so more expensive obviously, but not much.
India's space program is amazingly economical when compared to NASA. But they aren't as cheap per kg or as capable as SpaceX. They are "cheaper" in that they are launching much smaller rockets than SpaceX.
The GSLV can put 5,000 kg in LEO for around $36M. The PSLV puts 3,800 kg in LEO for around $15M. The Falcon 9 puts 22,000 kg in LEO for around $65M, re-usable is estimated around $45M for probably 15,000ish kg.
If you're trying to get a $250 million satellite into space, price savings of $20-30 million can easily be outweighed by a long history of successful, on-time launches.
One of these has a proven record in conventional launches and the other has a track record of innovating. Only one of these is required today.
Yes, maybe sometime after 2025ish they might have their so far completely theoretical re-usability plan in action. Even then, they are still throwing away far more stuff then SpaceX. They throw away a very expensive upper stage, solid fuel boosters and most of the core itself.
Additionally and that is not talked about enough, Arianspace can only compete on price at this level with Arian 6 because the development cost is majority funded by ESA (and co). They don't have to put that in their launch price. So Arianspace is essentially completely unable to compete with SpaceX in terms of cost.
As long as the Arian 6 flies, it well simply never be competitive in cost with the Falcon 9. Even in price it will not be competitive. The architecture of Arian 6 as currently planed is just not designed for it.
SpaceX won't be immune from this sort of meddling, but it's in a much better position to resist than, say, Arianespace or Roscosmos.
Note: at ~95% you would expect very long stings of successes not just 19 then one failure repeat. But, it's reasonable for those long strings to represent an increasing probability of success over time.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/spacex-explosion-amo...
Further, insuring a 5% risk to a 200m satellite and a 100m launch vs a 200m satellite and a 50m launch at 10% failure rate would not be 2x because the payout is 50m less. Also, if the numbers get overly lopsided SpaceX would offer insurance for it's customers at close to the actual risk adjusted costs.
As you say, if the insurance market were utterly deliquent it's inevitable that SpaceX would resolve the issue but I very much doubt it is. I wonder if it's done through lloyds...
You have a $200M satellite. Insurance on a Falcon 9 launch is $20M, your costs now are $85M. Even forgoing insurance on the Atlas V can't bridge the gap, and SpaceX's launch cadence is getting so rapid that you should be able to launch much sooner too.
Also, using a "flight tested" Falcon 9 apparently does not significantly raise the insurance rate: http://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/spacex/... "In one measure of the mission’s perceived risk, Halliwell said that the insurance rates SES is paying “did not materially change” from a typical launch on a new rocket."
Amateur radio cubesats, which use 100% volunteer labor, appear to cost ~ $50,000 for a 3kg satellite. Launch cost is significant for them.
And then there's the radiation, the liftoff stresses, vacuum welding, and the complete inability to repair the thing after launch.
You have a point on reliability, but I would ask you to consider that both Arianspace and ULA is pushing hard to get a new launch vehicle. There is no way, they would be doing that if they thought reliability was their big money maker. Additionally with their new rockets, that reliability will be mostly gone. Vulcan and Arian 6 need to build up a record as well, and that will be hard because they will both be very limited in launch cadence just because they don't actually have enough commercial flights.
If it takes two years to get your heavy launch payload scheduled then of course a ~$10M price difference is dwarfed by making sure nothing goes wrong on your end.
If SpaceX can reschedule you in a much tighter timeline, for a competitive or cheaper price, then simply building two payloads and skipping some of the exhaustive QA starts to make sense in a way it simply didn't before.
And as the market shifts to that kind of thinking, there's more business for rocket companies that can provide a quicker cadence, which allows them to grow farther, which reduces costs, etc.
And anyone who doesn't have a reusable product or expandability to match isn't able to take advantage of the new market reality.
Note that Atlas V had zero failures when it was young. So there's proof that new development doesn't necessarily hurt reliability. You're correct that the track record of reliability will be absent for the first couple of dozen launches, which will be quite a while for at least Arianspace.
Also the Atlas program has about 40 years of experience on SpaceX. But I should point out they've also maintained their glittering track record while regularly upgrading their rockets, so they've shown it can be done.
Ariane 2016: 7 launches (all successful)
SpaceX 2016: 9 launches (8 successes, 1 failure)
Ariane 2017: only 1 so far (don't know how many affected by the strike)
SpaceX 2017: 4 successes so far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ariane_launches_(2010%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
I feel it's a lot easier to make SpaceX's rockets safer than ULA's rockets cheaper and reusable.
Once spacex finds their sweet spot in design, they can shooting them up like crazy.
I am really looking forward to the moon mission. Last time it happened, I wasn't even born :(
The thing is that safety is cultural, not technical. It means that everyone realizes their limits, and has a conservative streak in them (if it ain't broken, don't fix it, or so least test it like crazy before putting a customers multi-million dollar payload on it). SpaceX, on the other hand, is all about moving fast and iterating fast.
NASA during Challenger would have been an example of the former [1]. In a way that I think many overly bureaucratic organizations are.
The other sense is somewhat oxymoronic given that conservatism is generally resistance to change. So when safety situations arise where the safest option requires acting novelly, who is there to lead the charge? I suppose in that case you'd want a radical safety department.
[1] From the NYT article on the findings of the Challenger commission, "As Commissioner Feynman observed, the decision-making was 'a kind of Russian roulette. . . . (The shuttle) flies (with O-ring erosion) and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. . . . You got away with it, but it shouldn't be done over and over again like that.'" http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/10/science/shuttle-findings-l...
Note that ULA does change things from time to time, but never does a test launch.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is on the 3rd or 4th revision of F9, but their accidents have not been related to changes to the rocket.
Let's not get carried away... SpaceX has done one reuse until now, and there is no way to know exactly how much savings it will net them in the long run.
I appreciate the endeavour they started, but the HN fan service for Musk and his projects is cultish sometimes...
Aside from that, in my experience the anti-Musk is less rational than the pro-Musk group... We have a guy here that's started amazing companies that otherwise probably wouldn't exist. In the past year we saw the first orbital-class rocket landing on the Earth, a landing on an autonomous drone ship on the ocean, first launch and landing of a reused rocket first stage, and we heard about a private company's plans to send tourists around the moon, and eventually, settlers to Mars. Without SpaceX, none of that would be on the table right now. We'd still be waiting on NASA. I think the cult following is totally warranted.
Yes, he may have lost his job for it but it's not myopic when ULA drops out of a competition leaving SpaceX as the only bidder and then announce a program to transistion to Blue Origin's systems.
[1] http://www.denverpost.com/2016/03/17/ula-executive-resigns-a...
The actual commercial market for launches is getting taken over by SpaceX. The only thing that holding them back is launch cadence and their government contract requiring them to make launches (COTS, Commercial Crew, USAF and so on).
They are building more launch sites as well, so they are really just pulling away from the competition in that area.
Anderson: So what have all your creative people come up with, then? What’s different in your basic technology versus 50 years ago?
Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.
It's literally bottom-up vs. top-down respectively. If you consider how far ahead SpaceX is up-top, having even interacted with the ISS, Blue Origin is that much further ahead near the ground. Overall SpaceX does seem to have chosen an approach that provides more traction. However, the BE-4 (orbital engine from Blue Origin) is slated for testing this year. It's going to be interesting to compare apples-apples once Blue Origin reach orbit.
However, Blue Origin's technical approach with New Glenn is sound and could easily give SpaceX a run for its money (but SpaceX likes to run anyway). Blue Origin is the only real long-term competitor for SpaceX that we've seen so far.
Even in spite of the fact that SpaceX is so far ahead, Blue Origin at least isn't making the same mistakes that 90% of SpaceX's competition is: using really outdated ideas that don't stand a chance at competing with SpaceX if first stage reuse works very well and /definitely/ no chance if upper stage reuse ends up working, too. Blue Origin is ultimately pursuing full reuse just like SpaceX, not partial gimmicks like engine pod reuse (which might be better than full expendable, but that isn't the standard any longer).
Blue Origin can and will be able to compete not because they have any kind of technical edge (they don't) but because their launch technology is going in the right direction and because Jeff Bezos has more money than God and wants to use all that cash to open the space frontier.
It's worth noting that Blue Origin was founded /before/ SpaceX and had been pursuing VTVL reuse while SpaceX was still messing with parachutes, but they basically squandered that initial lead and now are playing catch-up. But a billion dollars non-diluting investment each year certainly helps a lot, and I have no doubt that Blue Origin will succeed.
This is why BO is so behind. They went with new technology thus have a lot of catching up to do to the old designs and the guys running the old designs get an instant leg up, but ultimately will fail from a cost perspective. A bit like writing an OS and just using an established kernel or writing an OS with a new kernel. The latter will simply take longer but if your design is innovative it'll beat out the previous kernel designs.
I think SpaceX is something of a freakshow of success. Elon has talent and drive and surrounds himself by similar personality types on top of entering the space game at the right time where the STS to SLS delay was significant the US was hungry for private rockets. As well as our cooling of relations with Russia and the various rockets, engines, and launch services they're been providing post-communism.
BO being behind SpaceX is a bit like saying I can't outrun Usain Bolt but I can come within 5 seconds of his time. That's still incredibly impressive. I don't feel like the current private space race is necessarily zero sum. There's no big advantage to being #1 or hitting goals faster than the other guy. Practical concerns like scale, launch windows, economics, etc mean that SpaceX probably can't monopolize this market and competitors will always be able to land contracts as long as they're remotely competitive against the very expensive nation-state/public-private rockets we're so used to.
I also think the market will open up to a more casual manned program and I think the people behind the Dreamchaser will find a nation state or even private buyer. The DC mounted on a low cost SpaceX or BO rocket is going to be able to launch humans into LEO for a incredible fraction the STS or Soyuz do. I think we're in for a lot of interesting developments and I doubt it'll be SpaceX trouncing the competition as much as a very busy and competitive space market with SpaceX at the top, for now.
EDIT: In all seriousness, Blue Origin has had a reputation for secrecy, but in the last year or two, they've shed that partly because they're now a major contractor for ULA in a competition to provide the main engines for their new rocket (Vulcan). They are facing a politically-well-connected opponent (Aerojet-Rocketdyne). If they keep silent, they could very well lose out. I think that explains why Blue Origin has been very vocal even though it hasn't even been test-fired, yet. (I think Blue Origin's engine is way better than AJR's, BTW.)
SpaceX, on the other hand, had a reputation for loudly proclaiming any progress. Early on they would roll out half-finished prototypes as evidence of progress even though they still had a lot of work to do. Yet in the last few years, they've started being more secretive. Other than a few miniscule mentions in NASA PR releases from Stennis mentioning a little bit about the component testing, they've only publicly released evidence of all the work they've been doing after they did a test firing in Texas with Musk's big Interplanetary Transport System unveiling. SpaceX doesn't have as much reason to be show-boating progress, partly because they HAVE been making a lot of progress.
So since their secrecy is relatively recent, people assume that just because SpaceX hasn't loudly proclaimed something, that therefore they haven't made any progress, while Blue Origin is the opposite. But if you look at who has test-fired and who hasn't, then SpaceX is ahead for Raptor vs BE-4. If you look at actual orbital-scale reuse, SpaceX is far ahead. If you look at level of technology in the engine and things like Isp, density, and thrust to weight ratio, then Raptor is much higher than BE-4. If you look at thrust to weight ratio period, then Merlin 1D is ahead of everything in existence, with a thrust to mass ratio of somewhere between 150 to 200, depending on which version and thrust level. The nearest competitor is NK-33 with T/W of 137.
And "Living on Mars". No thanks, I'll pass on that too. I can certainly see the thrill of the ride described though and who wouldn't want to be weightless for 4-5 minutes? But the market for that carnival ride is about as big as the number of cars Ferrari sells each year so I don't get that.
One can call this a "steppingstone" tech for now if they choose but it's more likely to be a cliff unless there's something of real value here. Even if we go out on a limb and say all this is really a way for the wealthy to escape the planet they'll find there's no place close enough to go so even that doesn't make sense.
No, none of the above makes sense to me yet so there must be something more fueling this race than what's being said.
And hey, isn't there also a downside to poking holes in the upper atmosphere and/or ozone depletion? How long do we let someone profit off the effects of that?
I honestly don't know the answers to those questions but I do wonder about them.
Why, they'll be driving SpaceUbers, doing the laundry, delivering food, walking the dogs, etc of all the techies debugging the asteroid mining robots, of course.
And working in space...for what reason? For certain industry maybe, but is it a really a worthy goal to chase after? I don't know.
I am from Brazil, that is a gigantic country with stupid amounts of land. Also I really wanted to live on a rural community and farm a bit, yet somehow it seems 100% of the land, even the most inaccessible places, have an owner, and prices of land a ludicrous (land in Brazil somehow cost more than same land in France plus real medieval castle in it...)
So, colonizing mars sound awesome.
Well, trip to Mars won't be cheap, and by the point it is inhabitable for average people, it would have land owner maybe government as well, at that point.
You need to stop with the sour grapes, the tall poppy syndrome, and you need to start supporting the people who are actually doing shit. And you need to do it before the window of opportunity to use our technology to save ourselves closes. Keep in mind that me writing this comment to you is an enormous waste of my time, and I really thought it through, so please absorb the meaning in my words and stop having these pissing matches on the internet over things you completely misunderstand.
None of that is going to happen in our lifetime. But the lifetime of our great grandchildren? There's a good chance. After all, this isn't the first time. However we will have several centuries to adapt. The real issue is we're destroying the natural environment faster than it can possibly adapt or evolve, but we'd be doing that even without climate change.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
I really don't care if that causes some shade to fall on your fantasies of what this project might lead to. Not a bit. In fact, I couldn't care any less.
We are not discussing "Sci-Fi" here. This isn't a "Trekkie" convention, it's the real world effects of this we're talking about.
When you have billions of dollars, there are many ways you can choose to spend your money. Some choose to use it on fleeting pleasures, but luckily humanity has others who have decided to use those resources in a systematic way that would help the greatest number of people possible, those like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. We need those people. And we also need people who are willing to indulge the wildest fantasies of the human imagination in a completely reasonable way, like Musk and Bezos, who are thinking far ahead (and Bezos is the ultimate long term thinker), and realize that they now have the ability to bring about the innovation and lay out the first steps of commercial space exploration, which is necessary if the light of human consciousness is to see all the wonder the universe and the future has to offer.
Potentially, thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of billions of people populating multiple star systems. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people who are spending substantial amounts of money to make space travel feasible today, despite how unrealistic it seems to most of us.
Earth is complex enough for any person to be visionary. Please do not let your own interests overshadow others.
The net long term difference of which is effectively zero. Adventure travel Everest climbers are not pioneers, and provide no new knowledge about Everest or the human condition - while burning up millions in cash in the process.
The frontier is still terrestrial.
Edit: Typos
Rocketry comes pretty close though.
IIRC Elon Musk has stated that the cost of fuel is almost negligible in current rockets.
The money might literal be burnt in the form of fuel, but it will be only the cost of the fuel. Modern and older rockets had to burn that and effectively burn all the other disposable costs, like the whole rocket and every piece of gear sent up. The situation is certainly being improved by these new innovators, and that is the point that was trying to be made and it is highly likely that you knew that.
Vacationing with a view of the Earth's limbe is conceptually not that different from vacationing on a cruise ship around the Caribbean. Sure, the losgistics are a bit tougher; the ship goes Mach 25 and a broken window will boil everyone's blood in a few minutes. But the point is to get out of the house and get some reading done somewhere else.
"The billionaire tech entrepreneur also laid out a vision for space commercialization that stretches out for hundreds of years, leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space."[1]
This is hundreds of years in the future, at which point Bezos believes the population of the earth will be in the tens or hundreds of billions. He thinks the surface of the earth will be "zoned strictly for 'residential and light industrial'", probably for a combination of pollution, land quality, and resource scarcity. In that scenario (which seems unlikely) millions of people would be like .001% of the population, which makes... some sense?
[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-o...
where do you see this mentioned?
I think it's generally agreed earth population will never get to hundreds of billion, the demographic trend is to get to around ~10B and stop there (kids per family decrease as living conditions improve, and they are at ~2 in most of the world bar africa)
EDIT: AIU it, Bezos just thinks we will have laws set up to avoid destroying our environment, hence forbidding things like heavy industry on earth.
That was one thing in The Expanse (great TV show about basically this (and also a series of books that I haven't read yet)), that I found a bit odd. We're currently doing everything we can to replace truck drivers and miners on earth with robots. So why would truck driving and mining in space be done entirely by humans?
The problem with automation and AI is that a powerful enough AI will render any story pretty boring, because it can basically do anything. So when writing fiction, one has to put brakes on some implications of technology just to be able to make a story.
But assuming that fully-automated space-everything wasn't developed before Epstein drive[0], the geopolitical (systempolitical?) situation makes the whole scenario plausible - you have overcrowded Earth with most people living on Basic Income just because there aren't enough opportunities, Martians hell-bent on terraforming their world ASAP, and the Belters, who can't live downwell and whose ability to provide services to inner planets is the only way to survive out there. One could imagine a strong opposition to automated mining from the Belt, and powers on Earth and Mars not too eager to upset that.
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Also, read the books. TV show is awesome, but the books are even better :). I binge-read them all last month.
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[0] - pretty much the only fictional human technology in The Expanse; it's a hyper-efficient fusion drive
All of the culture novels feature "AI is that a powerful enough AI [sic]" yet I do not feel these stories are rendered boring. The AIs just become more characters.
My arguments would be what others already pointed out, that tourism is irrational industry and the crazier the ride, the more people will be interested.
I am really overjoyed that something is happening on space front.
The comparison is foolish.
NASA's estimates a trip to Mars would take 21 months [1]. I don't know where you work, but I doubt you have 21 months of vacation accrued. If you do, do you have the $250k per ticket? If you do, do you have mental / psychical health to be accepted? If you do, do you accept the flight risks? If you do, do you accept that time does not stop on Earth (loved ones aging, loved ones dying, etc)?
If you do, you're _incredibly rare_.
This isn't flying 6-hour flight to Mexico to sit on the beach.
You're not even close to the mark though.
I totally get the personal excitment. And with a few dozen millions dollars in my pocket I would totally invest into something fun even if uneconomical.
Probably people like Planetary Resources[0] and Deep Space Industries[1] that intend to get their raw materials from Space.
There isn't much joy in that.
You could sell your stuff to the local space colony of the billionaires a thousand kilometers away from the mining site.
I'll leave explaining most of that point to a pretty good filk song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab_mH8R0KTM
http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Julia_Ecklar:One_Way_To_Go
Maybe to quote one verse:
Breaking free of gravity, moving industry
Beyond the planet's surface into space
Lunar mines and factories, Lagrange Point colonies,
Total productivity and nothing goes to waste
Solar-sailing ships deployed to mine the asteroids
While Earth becomes a paradise, her ugly scars erased
There are lots of useful things to do in space, but we need to bootstrap a profitable economy in space to get there.
Moving things between space and earth will always be costly and people will still want to live on earth. If we can solve waste, productivity issues in space why should we not be able to also solve them on earth?
"Total productivity" and "Earth becoming a paradise" are dreams, of course. This is a song, not an economics report. But it outlines pretty well the things people might reasonably want to do in space, and why.
For a more 'down-to-earth' answer, we can look into the past - how did the space race, landing on the moon, etc contribute to the development of science, technology, art... Did that have anything to do with our development as a species ?
If we manage to settle on Mars, that would mean a great deal of new technological and scientific discoveries - which we'll be able to apply here on Earth. Maybe the solutions for the problems we experience here on Earth lay on other planets ?
Other planets will follow and eventually other stars. There will probably be generations of people who live and grow on a space ship, watching space youtube and movies all their lives - set in a strange distant place called Earth.
Eventually, they will arrive on a planet far away and settle there - maybe they'll forget all about their space trip and technology - become farmers and raise space chicken - only to reinvent rockets once again thousands of years later.
Maybe this whole thing is inside our DNA ?
I think realistically most of the people who first colonise mars will be doing it for financial reasons, because better options are not available to them on Earth.
Sure the delay fluctuates between 5-25 minutes, so you won't be enjoying any realtime activities like voice calls or playing Quake. [1] Initially bandwidth will probably also be too low to casually download 4K cat videos. However there won't be any issue with setting up a local Mars community web proxy that downloads HN & friends in compressed batches. There are a lot of things to do on the internet where even a 25 minute delay is no biggie.
--
[1] Although it shouldn't take too long until there are enough local people on Mars for low latency activities among themselves.
One thing i do believe is the possibility to mining space (specially asteroids, like this -> "NASA to explore asteroid made of $10,000 quadrillion worth of metal", google it).
I imagine SpaceX and Blue Origins playing a huge part (if not all) in the future of this kind of exploration.
In my mind, there's trillions of things to do here that we don't get to do. Sure looking at mars sky would be something amazing, but I'm not in a hurry.
Infrastructure, warehouses, and a rescue network mostly likely. Getting fuel reserves and supplies into particular places, making ranger stations, and maintaining all of that.
It's also not impossible that some mega rich people decide to fund private projects that only have a slim chance of making a profit. Most of them will fail, but they'll still need workers while it's ongoing, and that still means you're giving knowledge to humanity when those workers figure stuff out and train others.
>And "Living on Mars". No thanks, I'll pass on that too.
That's fine. It seems rough because it is (understatement of the year). But there's always going to be a subset of the population who just want to get out and explore and colonize. The risk is not for everyone, because yes, sometimes you go exploring and die for a stupid reason completely out of your control.
Besides, we really don't have any full-time Martian marketing agencies to influence everyone's perceptions of life on mars. So of course it seems terrible. :)
EDIT: And Blue Origin and SpaceX both use liquid fuel rockets exclusively which cause very little ozone depletion. There combustion byproducts are entirely made from oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon with no nitrogen or chlorine mixed in.
EDIT2: Also, apart from the danger of ozone depletion there really isn't any harm in "poking holes in the atmosphere". The atmosphere is a fluid, it flows back together just fine after the rocket passes.
Made in Space is working on producing ZBLAN optical fiber in orbit, for sale back on Earth. [1] ZBLAN is an alternative to normal silicate fiber which has much higher theoretical performance limits, but worse performance in practice due to gravity induced crystalline impurities. Producing it in microgravity should allow it to reach its full potential.
They haven't launched the first batch yet, but their claim is that because optical fiber doesn't weigh much, and this higher quality fiber is so valuable, it's actually profitable at current launch costs to do this manufacturing in orbit.
The linked article ends with a quote from the CEO: "We believe in-space manufacturing of goods valuable to people on Earth will soon drive significant commercial activity in space, perhaps one day creating a space-based economic boom." Consider the lithography processes our chips are made with, or the single-crystal turbine blades that help modern jet engines and rocket turbopumps work as well as they do. There's an enormous variety of precision processes that could benefit from operating under an ambient acceleration between 0 and 1g.
Orbital manufacturing is probably the most believable short term goal for commercial space, but there are a plenty of extremely exciting opportunities out there:
- The Mars colony will be our stepping stone out into the asteroids and the rest of the solar system. The thin atmosphere and lower gravity makes lifting mass from the Martian surface about an order of magnitude less difficult than lifting from Earth's surface. The difference is so extreme, that if you assume commodities will someday cost about the same on both planets, structures in Earth orbit would actually be cheaper to build and launch from Mars and then tug over to Earth.
- The potential wealth from mining other bodies is unfathomably huge. A small minority of asteroids out there are actually chunks of proto-planet cores unleashed during the violence of the early solar system. A single rock like that has more accessible platinum, rhodium, and other heavy metals than all known accessible deposits on Earth's surface. This fact becomes a little less surprising when you learn that all of Earth's accessible deposits are nothing more than impact sites from rocks like this. The "original" heavy metals of Earth all settled deep inside the core while the planet was still molten, far too deep for us to ever reach. These heavy elements are unbelievably useful. The state of the art in a huge fraction of the "hard" problems in chemistry boils down to "We can do it with platinum group catalysts, but those cost too much for industrial use."
- Orbital superstructures. Made in Space's Archinaut project [2] is an early effort to free satellite designers from the size and weight constraints of delicate folding structures riding inside a single rocket fairing. It's still early, but once launch costs drop and/or we start doing heavy in-situ mining, we can reasonably start building kilometer scale stations. Enormous solar arrays to power all our new orbital industry, or 5,000 person orbital ring cities with a relaxing level of partial g and perfect climate control. I'd love to live in a place like that.
My favorite analogy for this is the settling of America. Settling the new world in sailing ships that took a month to cross the Atlantic was a terrible investment with hardly any foreseeable return. But then we made better boats, and new communication systems, and all sorts of other new technologies which created exponential returns from the colonies. The west still leads the world because of the unimaginable profits it made off the Americas. Settling space, and particularly Mars, is the biggest opportunity we've had since the 1500s.
[1] http://www.madeinspace.us/projects/fiber/ [2] http://www.madeinspace.us/projects/archinaut/
I hope he sells more than he needs, faster than he needs, before this latest bubble (slight or extreme is open for debate) gives out. I wouldn't have guessed that Blue Origin could cost him ~$1 billion per year to subsidize. I'm glad he's doing it, very few people on the planet could afford to; of those that could, fewer still would care to.
I'm going out on a limb, but based on this alone, I rank the Star Trek franchise as one of the most influential bodies of fiction ever created. I think of it as a catalyst, rather than a cause, but still.
This article suggests Musk is a big fan of Star Trek as well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/without-star-trek-th...
(Forgive the click-bait title, it doesn't reflect my view.)
Musk was nearly bankrupt due to SpaceX and Tesla but now they've made him a billionaire.
Besides, all of the resources we pour into forcing the climate to not change (which would be unprecedented!) are all for naught when that asteroid hits.
...actually precedented by all the resources we pour into forcing the climate TO change.
And, asteroid, seriously? This is the best we can do now? May as well not eat meals anymore because hey I could get hit by a bus on the way to work.
Hiding in space from an asteroid strike is a bad plan. Earth during an impact winter is still much much more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
I would think the energy and infrastructure requirements to move most industry off-planet, integrate it with terrestrial civilization at scale, and maintain continuous growth, would be far more environmentally damaging than simply keeping it all on Earth.
You don't need to move the entire industry off-planet physically to reach a state where there is little industry on-planet and lots of industry off-planet. Tools can be made in space with materials on-hand up there. With those, you can get access to more materials (asteroid mining), and build more tools, more industry, etc.
The only real barrier right now is efficient transportation. Ion drives look poised to solve that problem.
Only if this sale generates a significant drop in price, which it probably doesn't (after all that price has continuously risen in the last few years). I'm no expert but I believe if you sell in small quantities at a time and at market price, you won't lower that price.
It's not that I don't admire the ambition. I do. But I really don't think that unfettered commercialization of even low missiles into space is a good idea.
From what I've read we do not know the potential effects this could have on the Ozone and upper atmosphere. We seem to be ignoring the precautionary principal with these projects.
To be fair, there wasn't much business incentive (although certainly a lot of political incentive) to go to the moon in the first place. But it ultimately led to numerous new technologies and markets, most notably GPS.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a good investment, but the biggest wins are always the biggest surprises (Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Apple were all initially hated by investors).
Raw materials transport seems the major constraining factor. Assuming some types of raw materials will be available on Mars, there's a high chance local Mars manufacturing of some basic goods will be more cost effective than manufacturing on Earth and transporting it.
It definitely won't be cheaper initially, especially if you want that manufacturing to serve the needs of people down on Earth; but it will make more space development cheaper (you don't have to move mass upwell, and as we know, Low Earth Orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System). So space industry will most likely initially work on developing itself and reducing its own costs.
And so far I've not heard of what or where they'll be mining. I've heard of getting water from comets but that's not really a profit maker either (unless maybe you make liqueur with it) so unless you've spotted one nearby made of precious metal I'm still not seeing the motivation for this.
I wonder what the math says about big mirrors focusing more sunlight over empty areas where we could put lots of solar panels.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a8101/elon-musk-o...
However, this doesn't create jobs in space, just jobs in space industries, since those datacenters are most likely fully automatized.
There is also the link problem: if the space DC is geostationary, it will be quite far making for a longer round-trip time (RTT) and latency. If it's closer, it needs a lot of radio stations on earth to keep the space DC connected. And each radio station is roughtly the investment of a real DC on Earth.
Advanced nano tech or virus development, for example.
Anything that skirts grey goo or 100% lethality rates.
Any problems and 'nuke the site from orbit'.
Tens of kilometres of hard vacuum too..
Slightly extrapolating of course.
I know if I were Bezos I would sell when I thought the stock was overpriced. I wonder if this is an indication that
Bezos and his team were brilliant for selling a bunch of convertible debt right before the 2000 crash. And let's not forget Bezos got his start at the quant fund DE Shaw.
You're thinking of the stock as an investment. To Bezos, though, it's an asset - something that can be sold when he needs liquid funds to finance an operation like Blue Origin. Perhaps he thinks it will be more profitable, or more fulfilling, or more fun. What's the point of having investments if you can't sell them unless they're overpriced?
If in every flight there were a satellite + space tourists, going to the space would be much more cheaper, and it's feasible I'm the near term. I see both SpaceX and Blue Origin offering "cheap" traveling to Space in less than a decade.
This will improve once the pad that was destroyed is rebuilt mid/late this year.
I have no doubt that Amazon wants to dig deep into space mining and being the backbone of the early solar economy. Who doesn't. It's gonna take a series of extremely smart investments for whoever does manage to pull that off. The barrier to a sustainable space economy is quite high.
When Amazon hits $500 billion, he'll be the richest person on earth. That's about 15% up from here, a gain likely to occur before a correction does.