halman":2fp5vyt5 said:
HopDavid,
Have you ever considered what impact carbon costs will have on industrial processing and mineral extraction here on Earth? It is quite likely that we are not going to be able to mine ore, smelt it down, and cast it here much longer, which will make any competing source cheaper than what we can produce here. Costs are subject to supply and demand. It used to be that hardwoods for furniture construction were readily available. Try finding large, clear pieces of hardwood today. Or consider crude oil: 75 years ago, most wells were less than 1000 feet deep. Today, we are drilling in thousands of feet of water, and going over a mile beneath the sea floor to reach oil deposits. A new field off of the coast of Brazil is being explored for exploitation, which will require drilling in 10,000 feet of water, and going nearly 3 miles beneath the ocean floor, through a layer of salt several thousand feet thick. We will never run out of crude oil, but we will probably not be able to use it for something as mundane as fuel after a while.
Environmental costs have only begun to be a factor in our technologically based culture, but they are threatening to increase at a rapid rate. We may soon face a choice of killing ourselves to maintain our technology, or moving it off planet.
As rich deposits are exhausted and human population (and therefore demand) goes up, I do expect commodities to increase in price.
And I believe space access can become much cheaper. A small rocket architecture could enable high flight rates which might justify mass production. I don't see mass production of Ares Vs.
Presently high delta V budgets mandate multi stage mega rockets for getting people to Mars, asteroids, etc. But a way to circumvent the exponent in the rocket equation is multiple sources of propellent and propellent depots at various locations. It will never be possible to send a single stage reusable rocket from earth's surface to Mars and back. However a small single stage reusable craft
could move between depots at LEO, EMLI, Phobos, and Deimos. Max delta V budget for such a craft would be around 4 km/sec. And if it never had to endure re-entry that further reduces mass requirements, failure modes and engineering difficulty.
A reusable lander/ascent vehicle between Mars and Phobos is perhaps doable. A reusable tanker to haul Lunar oxygen from the moon and EML1 is perhaps doable. Or, down the road, a mag rail could send lunar oxygen to EML1.
Developing Luna, Phobos and Deimos as propellent sources would take a greater initial investment than Mars (or asteroid) direct schemes, but it would enable transportation with smaller, reusable rockets. Smaller, reusable rockets are a sustainable architecture that could take us beyond flags and footprints.
A lot of people seem to have the notion that if only the incompetent, greedy, and evil NASA would get out of the way, private enterprise could skip going to the moon and starting building Martian colonies as well as cities in the main belt. Regardless whether a program is being conducted by SpaceX or NASA, if the vehicle is a disposable mega rocket with a low flight rate, it won't be sustainable and venture capitalists would never see a return on their investment.
Dropping a fully fueled ship from EML1 for a low altitude perigee burn would also be very helpful to send ships to asteroids (to guide this back to being on topic). Many asteroids are thought to be extinct comets that conceal volatile ice cores beneath an insulating mantle. These too are possible propellent sources.
In the near term I believe water rich asteroids will be the most valuable. With multiple propellent sources, returning asteroidal metal and other commodities to near earth space might become profitable.