

Space: The Final Frontier of Profit? - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059350409331536.html?mod=WSJ_hp_editorsPicks

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philk
_Most people don't realize that the major cost of a launch is labor. Fuel is
less than 2%, while the standing army of people and infrastructure is well
over 80%._

Rather interesting that. I'd always thought the main expense was fuel.

I still think it's a long way off, it's not enough for a half kilometer wide
asteroid to be worth $20 trillion, the minerals within have to be less
expensive than earth bound alternatives.

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patio11
_[E]verything we hold of value—metals, minerals, energy and real estate— [is
available] in near-infinite quantities in space._

Yes, and there is a pot o' gold at the end of every rainbow. A pity you have
to bring it back here to be able to get any use out of it. If there were a pot
o' gold in earth orbit and I had a space shuttle ready to go up and snag it
I'd be better off canceling the launch, letting the gold rot, and pocketing
the money saved. It doesn't matter if that pot o' gold were the size of an
aircraft carrier.

How long before bored billionaires figure out that being on a souped-up jet
with sucky cabin service has lost its $X-million-a-pop "story you can brag
about to your friends" cachet, and we actually have to start extracting value
out of space? Private industry is then going to go back to exploiting space
via the only thing we can move without incurring fuel & etc costs: data, via
satellites.

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jerf
I think you either grossly underestimate the value of gold or overestimate the
cost of a flight. (Or have a really, _really_ weird idea about economics and
when you've made a profit.) Besides, even if _you_ think you're better off
sitting on your ass, that doesn't mean everyone will, or should.

But your point is irrelevant, because we need those minerals anyhow. Remember
the people who point out that we don't have enough platinum on Earth to make
enough fuel cells for cars (and other things), or enough rare earths for other
worthy green technologies? The value of those minerals is going up over time
as we deplete our supply, the costs of spaceflight will go down. The question
is when those curves cross, not if. There are some things that we can do a lot
better with those resources that just "sitting on Earth" is not going to be a
_economically_ viable alternative to.

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_delirium
Gold is a weird case, in that we _don't_ actually have much practical use for
gold. Some, sure (electrical contacts and such), but the vast majority of its
value is circular: it's valuable because people perceive it to be a safe store
of value, and therefore lots of it is held in vaults. A sudden discovery of a
way to get large quantities of gold to earth could cause its value to totally
collapse to near-nothing.

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jerf
Yeah, that's why I switched to discussing platinum. Not only is it generically
useful, it's even useful strictly from a "we need to learn to live on Earth
first" sense. We don't have enough for known green technologies.

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DannoHung
I'm not sure that people are mentally prepared for the risks that human space
flight will incur under private industry.

People will die in the name of making manned space flight affordable. Is there
going to be a public backlash from this? After both Space Shuttle disasters
there were year long backoffs from Shuttle launches.

A commercial entity will not have the luxury of just halting its mission for
multiple fiscal quarters because of fatal engineering issues.

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waterlesscloud
How many commercial fisherman died on the job last year? How many coal miners?
Truck drivers? Electricians?

The fact that you don't know (neither do I) says a lot about the risks some
businesses take in stride.

There's a business world outside of offices full of computers, and some of
those jobs involve literally deadly risk.

And yet those industries still thrive.

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w1ntermute
_How many commercial fisherman died on the job last year? How many coal
miners? Truck drivers? Electricians?_

How many electricians don't know the basics of not electrocuting themselves?
His point is that space is a new frontier, and we don't yet have standard
safety protocols in place. The only way to develop them will be through trial
and error, which will inevitably involve the loss of human life.

