Comment by upwardbound | Hacker News Reader

Comment by upwardbound | Hacker News Reader

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If you're interested in exciting hard sci-fi about mining the asteroids and the moon, check out Daniel Suarez's compelling novel Delta-V and its recent sequel Critical Mass.

Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity. Yes, the idea of this only being available to the super-rich (at first) is nauseating to me too, but if it provides the source of funding to establish sustainable moon bases, that would be incredible, and other industries could follow afterwards, including e.g. new sports leagues such as low-gravity basketball and soccer.

Eventually, enough people would be living on the moon as helpers for the wealthy folks and athletes that eventually there would be so many working-class people on the moon that secondary and tertiary industries would spring up to provide products and services for the working-class people. Soon enough it would become profitable to farm crops on the moon (for lunar consumption), build products on the moon (for lunar consumption), and more.

We'd eventually get to the point where a lunar nation could have positive GDP and be economically self-sustaining. It would be a trade partner with the terrestrial nations, and be the first new nation to step beyond Earth. Generations of people will get married and be born there, and humanity would be a step closer to settling the cosmos.

I don't think people realize the scale of what Starship stands to achieve here. This is not an incremental leap forward, this is revolutionary. Sending a 16oz bottle of water up to space on the Space Shuttle cost around $25,000. [1] Falcon Heavy brought that down to $700. Starship stands to bring that price down to as low as $5!

That's what makes this all so stupefyingly difficult to even begin to try to predict what will happen. We're not going through the usual window of exclusivity. We're going from [nobody can afford this, except governments - and even then only for toy missions] to ['everybody' can afford this for anything], instantly. So there's no reason that e.g. a nursing home, or anything else, on the Moon would be restricted to the super wealthy, besides demand. Obviously these industries will be being built from the ground up, and demand will likely dramatically outpace supply for the foreseeable future. But that cost imbalance would not be because of fundamental costs.

Also you left out the most fun. Who isn't going to want to go have sex in space? Either with a partner or catching some Moon Poon at a brothel? That's going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions, and shouldn't really require that much to get the initial infrastructure erected.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...

> Sending a 16oz bottle of water up to space on the Space Shuttle cost around $25,000. [1] Falcon Heavy brought that down to $700. Starship stands to bring that price down to as low as $5!

Wow, that's insane; as you said, I didn't even realize this leap is this vast! $5 for delivery of a bottle of water is barely more expensive than DoorDash or Postmates on Earth!!

Well that's because you're paying a person and a motor vehicle's worth of fuel just to move a bottle of water. If you filled your vehicle full of water, and upgraded to a semi-trailer full of water, then its a lot less than $5 for a bottle of water.

If you launched a Starship with just a single bottle of water it'd become way more than $25,000. Similarly you could make your doordash/postmates bottle of water a lot more expensive if you moved it with a semi-trailer and a team of movers.

> catching some Moon Poon at a brothel [is] going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions

I don’t know what laws apply on the Moon, but thanks to ITAR, Starship probably won’t be able to launch from outside the United States, which means any actual moon travel is going to be governed by US and Florida and/or Texas law. Neither of those states have legal prostitution, and while I’m not a legal expert, I suspect knowingly ferrying prostitutes to the moon might be considered a form of human trafficking. They shut down Backpage for less.

Would it not be reasonable under ITAR to launch from other ITAR regulated countries, such as Japan (JAXA) or France (French Guiana/ESA)?

France and Japan also have laws against prostitution and sex trafficking. Japan seems to have more loopholes than France but probably not enough to fly prostitutes to the moon.

Once we are able to send a Starship to Psyche 16, and start building new Starships, humanity is in for a huge leap. And this isn't even unrealistic - it could be that in 5 - 10 years the next major rush for humanity is to establish a permanent industrial presence on Psyche 16 and start making things...

Why would that be your first idea? Why not something simpler like building a moon orbiter with an aluminium and liquid oxygen hybrid engine? The goal is to find the hydrogen on the moon, which is far more valuable than some asteroid.

Meh. Gaining accesses to the resources available on Psyche 16 would be absolutely a civilization-changing event if we were able to harness them somehow. Imagine if gold was more common to the human species than aluminum?

A launch costing (150 tons have roughly 300000 bottles) 1.5 million USD is insanely cheap and that obviously includes some profit ...

The fuel alone for the rocket costs $1M. $1.5M does not include profit.

Old folks living "fuller lives" on the Moon, hundreds of thousands of miles away from their grandkids and everybody else they know? Have you ever been to an old folks home? Wishing people visited them more often is most of what most of them talk about.

A sad few with no remaining attachments to the rest of Earth might benefit from a reduced risk of hip fracture, but that hardly seems like a good economic basis for a Moon base.

> Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity.

That's what SR Hadden did in Contact ;) as always, Carl Sagan is still teaching us to this day

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