Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

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There is inherent value stored in all of Spacexs accomplishments thus far that is very, very hard to place financial value on simply because it is the only asset in the world with the capability.

A reusable rocket? How much would China pay for that capability? Don't worry about ITAR rules, it's a hypothetical question to understand the value of having such an asset available for defense or aerospace contracting purposes.

The centuries prior to the digital age, whole private empires were built on the back of shipping and transport. Spacex is presently sitting on the largest payload capability fleet in the world, by tonnage to orbit. Yes, including China. Yes, including Russia, Yes, we're not even counting one single Starship here yet.

The alloy itself that allows their turbines to run as hot as they have demonstrated to achieve such insane chamber pressures. What is that worth? No one else in the World has been able to do that in the history of mankind (In the unclassified realm atleast)

The thing i love about the company that you allude to as well is they're running a ship that converts these "ideas" into tangible business value quicker than anyone we've seen in classic space industries.

I have no domain specific knowledge so would love some feedback…

Once starship actually works it seems like a less complicated task diverting asteroids and mining them. Obviously not easy with a million new problems, but still easier than a fully reusable space transport system.

At that point humanity’s resources will become orders of magnitude larger. It will be a different world.

And I don’t see how this doesn’t happen in my lifetime.

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

The total mass of the asteroid belt is about 4% that of the Moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Size_and_mass:

The Moon's mass is 1/81 of Earth's

So, the total mass of the asteroid belt is about 1/2000 that of earth. Assuming (slightly incorrectly) an even distribution of mass throughout earth, thats’s about as much as in the outermost 1/6000 of the radius of earth, or the top km.

That’s a lot of material, but there also is the complication that asteroids are far away, and far away from each other.

⇒ I wouldn’t count on asteroid mining making our resources orders of magnitude larger.

Space is both big and small though. The distances are large, but everything is measured in Delta-V - once something is on its way, it's going to get there no matter what.

And unlike Earth, we don't live in any of that volume.

Composition is important. Most of Earths metal is in the core and completely inaccessible. However there appear to be some asteroids that are largely composed of metal and are completely exposed.

We mine about 3 billion tonnes of iron a year. A single iron rich asteroid could plausibly have hundreds or even thousands of times as much iron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-type_asteroid

One thing we can be almost certain of: no asteroids will be diverted, in any meaningful sense, in your lifetime. Maybe in 50 years robots will be nipping off bits of some, to loft someplace where they are wanted.

May be so, but it's also quite possible we will have started the diversion process within that period, it's just these things take a lot of time.

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