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Comment by sacred_numbers | Hacker News Reader

There's no environment in space, so displacing heavy industry on Earth (which does have an environment) with industry in space would theoretically be a good thing. This depends on exactly where in space you do this, though, and the number of rocket launches on Earth required to support heavy industry in space could have a significant impact on the environment.

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Sure heavy industry in space wouldn't pollute the Earth, but the physics for this just don't work out. How would you get all the produced goods back to Earth? Lots and lots of rockets that would then have to fly back up to space. The energy involved with that would be massive and cost prohibitive on the scale that it would need to be in order to replace any meaningful amount of heavy industry on Earth.

A space elevator could potentially be much better, but none of these private companies are pursuing space elevators.

Investing money into developing renewable energy power for heavy industry makes infinitely more sense, but isn't as cool as launching rockets. IIRC the Gates Foundation is investing in a solar powered method for smelting steel.

Indeed. It doesn't take a billionaire to figure out that, the further away something is, the more it costs to get it to the customer.

Maybe that's Bezos endgame. Your Amazon packages are dropped from space. Delivery time is only limited by terminal velocity.

Exactly. And "space" itself isn't a great place for industry, it has solar radiation for power, vacuum and no gravity for certain industrial processes, and lots of space to put things.

I expect heavy industry (and mining) will be on vacuum worlds like the Moon, asteroids, and Mercury, with some specialized processes and assembly done in orbit. Space is mostly for power satellites and habitats.

I think lots of industrial processes actually require an atmosphere or at least some of the gases in ours. It would make more sense to make those processes less harmful down here than move them to space

I think it partially depends on how you go about it.

If you’re moving heavy industry to Earth orbit and supporting it entirely with material shipments from earth, yeah that seems like a no-go.

On the other hand, if it’s the moon, asteroid belt, or even Mars we’re talking about, you really just need enough launches to bootstrap the operation. The bulk of other materials can procured locally, reducing the number of launches to just those getting personnel to the stations, which would be dramatically fewer in number and less than a rounding error in terms of emissions (each rocket launch is roughly equal to a commercial flight, the latter of which there are tens of thousands each year).

I'm not in either industry, but doesn't mining (like oil) depend on getting the low-hanging fruit first? In other words, how can you profit from mining if your costs are exponentially higher than folks doing the same work here on earth?

Even if the entire mining operation were already setup (at a cost of thousands of dollars per kilo of weight sent up there), you would still have the costs of getting the mined materials back down here and those are likely to be astronomical, so to speak.

I’m not in either industry either, most of what I’m saying is based on what I’ve gathered as a space enthusiast.

The cost issue is multifaceted.

Most of it is sunk into launching itself, which is where things like space tourism come into the picture as a way to provide an initial business case and eventually, economy of scale. Addressing that alone will improve the economics of off-world industry quite a lot just on its own.

For the other part, initially companies will just have to eat the cost to get things up and running. This really isn’t that unusual — we just haven’t had much in the way of truly new frontiers in many years and have grown accustom to business ventures being relatively low cost and low risk. That said, this could also be partially subsidized by researchers and tourists, since there is certain to be interest from universities and other organizations to send people to study these other bodies, and there are most certainly a surprising number of individuals both wealthy and crazy enough to want to go stay on Mars for a couple of years.

1kg of a commodity in earth orbit should be worth more than 1kg of the same commodity on earth because it's stuck in earth's gravity well. The orbital commodity has significantly more potential energy.

Now, there's not yet much of a market for commodities outside of earth, but as soon as there is, producing a commodity on the moon and shipping it to earth orbit will likely be cheaper than shipping it from earth - at least once scales are large enough.

>There's no environment in space

So that explains how the ship was towed "beyond the environment" in the classic "Front fell off" sketch. They just took it to space.

[Interviewer:] So what do you do to protect the environment in cases like this?

[Senator Collins:] Well, the ship was towed outside the environment.

[Interviewer:] Into another environment….

[Senator Collins:] No, no, no. it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment

[Interviewer:] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.

[Senator Collins:] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.

[Interviewer:] Well, what’s out there?

[Senator Collins:] Nothing’s out there…

...

Where does heat go, though.

Fantastic question. Lacking an atmosphere, it wouldn't go anywhere. The ultimate insulator. So whatever heat you produced in your space rock factory would stay right there. There's no such thing as air conditioning in space, bereft as it is of that first component, air.

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