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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

So the 'steamroller' is now up to speed.

Does anyone have any ideas if Spacex will actually grow the launch market, rather than just dominate. What new things become possible with lower cost access to space.

Spacex are developing communications satellites for internet, what else?

Edit: Thanks for all the replies so far, I was thinking more down to earth (di dum ch) things rather than theoretically possible. Eg I know that certain drugs are made in space because the crystal structure requires zero g (or something), so is that something with pent up demand, or some exciting materials that are awaiting lower cost manufacture.

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> Does anyone have any ideas if Spacex will actually grow the launch market, rather than just dominate.

Total global launch numbers per year has been trending up since mid '00s, when the market was at an all time low. This upward trend predates Spacex and is larger than Spacex. The record number of annual global launches is 120 in 1967. 2018 has had 98 launches so far. There are 172 planned launches for 2019. [0]

> Does anyone have any ideas if Spacex will actually grow the launch market, rather than just dominate. What new things become possible with lower cost access to space.

Spacex is enabling new space projects in two areas. Having the cheapest launches, and having the largest single launch lift capacity. In the future, before Mars, we can expect to see more enabling from Spacex, such as having the cheapest human launches, and having even more lift capacity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight

> [...]lower cost access to space[...]

One thing not covered by existing comments but which has made a lot of difference, and most people don't even think to list since it's taken for granted everywhere else. Price discovery, we now actually know the cost.

Before Space X the costs of the launch industry were shrouded in mystery. Nobody would give you a quote without a meeting and an NDA, and certainly not post prices on a website[1].

Even if SpaceX had absolutely nothing to offer beyond ULA and Arianespace other than the exact same services at the same price but with public pricing it would already have been a big deal.

Businesses can now make plans for getting a payload in orbit without speculation about what the cost are going to be.

1. https://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

The big growth market right now is earth observation - companies like Planet Labs that rely on low launch prices to make their "cheap" camerasats worthwhile to launch. We'll see what markets come up next.

In the short term, though, SpaceX has actually shrunk the market - there's a slowdown in the historically-dominant geostationary launch market, since there's a lead time of a few years on those big expensive satellites and all the manufacturers put plans on hold a couple of years back while they were waiting to see what would happen in the launch market. Hence it taking until December this year for SpaceX to reach its previous-year launch number - 10%-ish growth is actually very slow by SpaceX standards.

(This is also a motivation for SpaceX to play with things like running its own comsat constellation - they'll have extra capacity for the next year or two while the GEO market restabilizes.)

In addition to asteroid mining and other industrial activities, once pricing comes down, I think entertainment could be a large market.

Space tourism is one possibility, but tourists have to deal with getting sick going up.

I think entertainment produced in space but sold on Earth could be big - particularly space sports! You could design sports that are just not possible to play on a planet.

More or less you can control Gs going up. The bigger challange will always be Gs when going down thru no atmosphere violently slowing down from 30,000 mph to 150. There is no viable way to slow you down “slowly” when gravity takes over.

“No-grav” sports sounds interesting but I think with relatively cheap travel the biggest thing will be building a smaller (financially feasable) version of Elisium.

The Gs aren't in the range of "danger to human life", at least not for nominal mission profiles (all bets are off if things go wrong, of course). For the foreseeable future you'll likely just have to be willing to deal with "rough rollercoaster ride lasting minutes" if you want to go to space. For a lot of people, that excitement will even be some of the appeal.

People keep say astroid mining but I've yet to see a convincing business case...

A simple use case would be mining asteroids for ice and selling it to NASA for use in the ISS.

The ISS isn't a big enough water market to merit this kind of activity. This might be viable if we had 100x more people in space.

also asteroids generally orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, the delta-v needed to take water mined from a main belt asteroid and bring it to LEO, then match it with the inclination of the ISS orbit at 51.6 degrees inclination is non-trivial.

While it's a non-trivial amount of delta-v, if the asteroid has a large amount of water then the water already present on the asteroid can be used to generate the delta-v.

Attempting to put an asteroid into LEO is perhaps the worst risk/reward ratio humanity ever conceived. No way it's going to happen.

Are you thinking of comets? Asteroids are generally closish to the ecliptic. You'd normally want to find easy to reach asteroids rather than randomly choosing asteroids and there are a number you can get to for just 100 m/s beyond Earth escape, though it'll take a while at that speed.

The problem is that nearby asteroids tend to be dry since they're being warmed by the Sun as much as Earth is and lack Earth's gravity well, ozone layer, and magnetic field. You want to go to Jupiter's trojans or so, or maybe just Ceres if you're willing to deal with its gravity well and dig a bit. For Jupiter's orbit you're looking at 3,300 m/s plus escape. Still a lot less than getting to orbit and you can use an ion drive but hardly trivial.

I agree that cheaper launches will not do much to directly change the business of astroid mining. The majority of the cost, even today, are not related to rockets.

> The majority of the cost, even today, are not related to rockets.

"Even today". There is an opinion that payloads are so expensive because the launchers are expensive. I.e., you can't send replacements easily, because a launch is expensive, so you have to design the payload so that it wouldn't break, and last 9-s of reliability cost additional 0-s in price.

In other words, if launchers would become cheaper, that would encourage sending more payloads which isn't designed to be as reliable and serve as long. If something happens, just send a replacement. The issue of space junk comes to mind, but if launches are cheaper you can include into the launched mass the active means of dealing with space junk, like fuel for deorbiting.

Asteroid mining would require brand new technology. We cannot crash an entire asteroid into Earth's surface, we would need to do zero g mineral processing, regardless of how the minerals are ultimately used. This is a task no one has ever done before. How do you estimate the cost of doing something like this? I'm not qualified, but I do know if a traditional mining organization decided to mine an asteroid the launch costs would be a small line item in their budget.

The traditional NASA ideology is risk averse. It's way easier for them to spend billions doing all kinds of tests and modelling to ensure mission success on the first try. This looks suspiciously related to unwillingness to do multiple similar missions on the side of the customer - i.e. Congress in this case. Once in 1990-s there was an attempt to do things "faster, better, cheaper", which today could be named "move fast and break things", but with some inevitable failures the approach fell out of favor.

As for asteroid mining, Caterpillar was considering lunar base operation equipment on a previous iteration (G.W.Bush program). You probably right, they'd present a hefty bill, but I somehow doubt they'd offer something truly innovative. Maybe with new scrappy startups we can drastically slash those non-launch costs - then we'll come back again to the question of launch prices.

> Maybe with new scrappy startups we can drastically slash those non-launch costs - then we'll come back again to the question of launch prices.

Over time asteroid/moon mining is inevitable. Technology will develop (costs fall), and we'll exhaust the mineral supply of Earth (prices increase). I'm sure, among many other types of organizations, scrappy startups will help us get there.

What are we proposing to mine? The business case for platinum is easy to make if there is a quantity of relatively pure ore. The business case for iron is hard to make. Unfortunately iron is common on earth and on asteroids (I'm confident in making that statement without looking it up so I guess I could be wrong). Platinum is rare on earth and in great demand, and seems to be just as rare in space.

I can come up with other cases, but there is a lot of other technology that needs to be worked on before we are ready to build generation ships heading to other star systems.

Iron in space is worth a lot more than iron on earth. It is expensive to get that iron from earth into space. Possibly cheaper to get it from asteroids to earth orbit, or the moon for building space structures.

Apparently the precious metal content on asteroids is through the roof. Titanium, Nickel, Platinum, etc. One study concluded that there was more than a trillion dollars worth of metal on one asteroid alone.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/07/19/trillion-do...

And there's 0.005 ppm / kg * 5.97219 * 10^24 KG * 29540 $/kg = ~ 1 sextillion dollars worth of platinum in the earth's crust.

There's no case for bringing asteroids to Earth in any reasonable time frame. But on the other hand bringing stuff up Earth's gravity well and even loose rubble could be useful if brought to Earth orbit.

Planetary Resources just folded up shop and got sold. The new company is liquidating most of the assets from what I can tell. That's a shame. That looked like a really interesting concept.

They also proposed super fast intercontinental travel via BFR. I think they claimed something like ~20m NYC to Shanghai travel time.

Unfortunately it would have the Ryanair problem of 'Shanghai' spaceport being somewhere in the Gobi desert. And 'NYC' spaceport being somewhere in the Nevada desert, so the journey will still take 12 hours.

Plus I can't see China accepting US owned ballistic trajectory rockets firing at their major cities.

Even taking conventional rail tens of miles outside a major city to ride a rocket will overall be faster than conventional air travel. I believe the SpaceX proposal for intercontinental travel involves a ferry boat to a floating launch pad and they don't need thousands of miles of safety buffer.

I don't think the BFR will deliberately land at ballistic speeds because it would kill all the passengers. Local authorities would have plenty of chances to monitor the reentering vehicles. We fly airplanes the size of strategic bombers to China constantly and there don't seem to be any problems.

Yes I might have been exaggerating. I don't think 20 minutes is likely though. Flying is routine, and what proportion of the door to door journey is actually the flight?

And can you imagine the nimbyism for any spaceport near a major city. I even predict that they'll be using images of Russian children, playing on a discarded rocket, with a farmhouse near by.

Yes a large plane could be a bomber, I think rockets are different. We have had 50+ years of major powers staring at early warning systems waiting for an attack. It will be a hard habit to break.

The “20 minute flight” is the same stage of travel as the “15 hour flight” of a conventional airplane. It’s apples to apples. While a spaceport will have to be farther away than an airport it will not have to be 8 hours away. Mostly because that’s an absurd distance that ends up crossing multiple other populated areas.

How is a spaceport significantly different from an airport? Both are disruptive of their surrounding area. Spaceports will make a lot more noise so they will have to be farther out in unoccupied territory but it’s still completely manageable.

Early earning systems intially looked for planes then rockets. The indicators changed with technology. SpaceX isn’t going to launch a rocket at Shanghai without calling local authorities and working to build local infrastructure. It will not come as a surprise to anyone.

It’s really not complicated.

Well as I said, I was exaggerating, yes there probably will be time benefits, it wont be travelling the world I 20 minutes.

I'm not sure where you're located but here in the UK, every time a Heathrow airport expansion is mooted, the amount of resistance it meets is massive.

We are currently planning a spaceport, but its in Scotland. Although to be fair I don't think good transport links to major population centres was considered in planning.

Then I think of Concorde and think even if you have a product that does what its supposed to do, sometimes that isn't enough.

Maybe it will be released as a product, I just cant see it being successful. Maybe it ends up like Concorde finding a small niche. Maybe its used as a joy ride. Maybe the numbers just don't add up and it dies a death. I just don't see myself going on a summer holiday in one.

> Plus I can't see China accepting US owned ballistic trajectory rockets firing at their major cities.

It wouldn't break mutually assured destruction.

But of course, the great thing about it is that the Chinese then get to send that same ballistic missle back to us.

Kind of a nice way to start to create some trust - it’s not a one way affair.

It's becoming a lot more economical to launch small payloads, which has led to an increase in noncommercial payloads. Some of these are research-y (like university projects, or a tomato growing testbed that Germany sent up on this rocket).

Some are less practical. This particular launch had 2 cubesat art projects. One is a reflector designed to be highly visible in the night sky, sponsored by the Nevada Museum of Art. The other is a golden canopic jar purportedly containing the soul of the first African-American astronaut (who died before going to space). That one is from the LA County Museum of Art (not to be confused with a different commercial cubesat also on the rocket, which contains the physical remains of many deceased people).

I don't know how much of the lowered cost for these payloads is due to cheaper launches in general, or benefits of ridesharing.

As any satellite project takes many years from planny to launch, I could imagine it will take the marked quite a bit to fully absorb the availabiltiy of the SpaceX services. Launches get cheaper and with the F9Heavy larger satellites could be designed.

> What new things become possible with lower cost access to space.

Mars.

real time google earth

go outside and wave hello

DigitalGlobe did something like that recently: http://blog.digitalglobe.com/industry/sending-data-from-spac...

Not sure if you're being serious.

On first thought I thought you were joking, but then real time traffic, Forest fire/ eruption/ tsunami alerts. Massive amounts of data to process, but could be useful.

This is essentially what Spire is doing. Their weather processing facility is here in Boulder.

https://spire.com/

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