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[Dunamisdeos]

I'm down for supporting the cool factor.

[wierd]

@wierd
But where's the investment and maintenance cost for the lunar manufacturing base in all of that? I.e. how many tons would one have to send from the Moon vs from Earth to justify the initial cost of the base? How many tons per year to justify its maintenance? Because that might prove to be such a huge number, that it's not going to be even needed in any sort of a foreseeable future.

That's where space tourism comes in.

Nobody goes to the moon to see the aluminum smelter or the water ice mining teams. They go to the moon for the low G amusment park, and to see the earthrise.

A small but luxurious hotel, and frequent tourist transfers from earth (via the reduced launch costs of routine rocket launching and the reduced crew needs due to anticipated refueling at the moon before return), getting visited by people with entirely too much money, enables crew to be non-revenue flights.

At least in theory.

[Il Palazzo]

At least in theory.

Yeah. Until such time when somebody shows me a proper cost analysis for the Moon base that doesn't rely on vague, unquantified propositions, I won't be taking the 'it's cheaper from the Moon' argument seriously.

[wierd]

Well, spacex DID book a flight around the moon using billionaire disposable income...

It must not be entirely unworkable.

I just don't have any figures to draw from because no serious attempts at something that scale has ever been attempted.

[Lord Shonus]

More practically, there are some very serious economic incentives.


Just as one example, there is a metal called Iridium. In theory, it has a ludicrous number of potential uses. The primary problem is that it is an extremely rare metal on Earth, because most of it sank into the mantle and core as the planet was forming. However, it is much more common (something like 500 times as common) at sites of asteroid impacts. The notion that most accessible iridium is of extraterrestrial origin is so solid that the location of a large deposit is the basis for the "an asteroid killed the dinosaurs" theory.

The same is true (albeit to a lesser extent) of platinum and a host of other highly valuable minerals. Asteroid mining has the potential for massive economic benefit, and quite possibly ecologic benefit as well - there is a real chance that asteroid mining would shut down a lot of planetary mining and processing from sheer accessibility.

The first step to making this theory a reality? A permanent base on Luna.

[Hanslanda]

Basically space is empty but also full of cold hard cash.

[SaberToothTiger]

yay more monies for already rich men who can afford to exploit extraterrestrial sources of income to further strengthen their position go us

[Il Palazzo]

More practically, there are some very serious economic incentives.

Yeah, no. It's the same vague argument as weird's. No quantified benefits.
So precious metals are some percentage more abundant in some asteroids. How much cheaper space mining of those could be as compared to just mining those metals on Earth? Given this cost difference, how much total would have to be mined in order to return the initial investment in the base and the entire development of space mining operations? How large an annual demand for those metals would have to be to justify the base maintenance and mining costs? Etc.

[wierd]

It also happens to be the only (even theoretically) logistically feasible way to finance truly high quality science on other planets in our solar system.

Sure, we can send probes, but there are a lot of sacrifices with sending those.  The number of experiments they can run is limited. The instruments they carry is limited. The terrain they can navigate is limited. .. ... On and on and on.

Lowering mission costs through establishing permanent space presence, and maintaining that permanent space presence through leveraging billionaire vacationing and asteroid mining operations, is how you get there.

Getting a reliable resource pool (even an expensive one) for useful materials like iridium (which as a number of interesting materials science and semiconductor manufacture applications) would enable new categories of fancy products to be made, that ordinary people like you and I could get to enjoy.

There would be a wealth of ancillary benefits to the thing, should it be successful.

Again, we dont know if it will be or not, because we really dont have any actuarial tables to make estimates from.  Initial estimates will be very liberal on costs, because of those unknowns.  Establishing true feasibility based on those padded estimates is not consistent with a true reality-- But again, we dont KNOW what the true reality even IS.  We can only know that after attempting it.

The best way to look at this is the planning stage for a very expensive and dangerous experiment, being undertaken because there is potential for a dramatic change in human history riding on its success or failure.

@palazzo

Your position is one of perfect safety-- You cannot be wrong in it.  Since the information you demand does not exist, you can comfortably assert that it is easier on earth, because you do have numbers for that.  With the same stroke, you remove any attempt to collect the data that would contra-indicate your assessment.

One of the reasons to attempt a permanent space presence, is to know what those recurring and actuarial costs of operating one actually are, and to know if further development along that line is reasonable or not.  Right now there is insufficient data to know.

[Dunamisdeos]

Y'kno we are going to blow up the moon, right? It's gonna happen.

[sluissa]

Also an accessible source of Helium-3 which might be helpful in figuring out fusion power.

Also also we've literally only looked at a handful of rocks on the place and walked maybe a few miles. There's still plenty to explore there. Nobody's saying we stop using robotics, but one of the main issues with current robotic exploration is that when something breaks, unless we've built in redundancy, it stays broken. Until we figure out how to replace ourselves fully, there will still be situations where the human mind and human dexterity will be important to overcome an unforeseen obstacle.

But yes, I'm fine with a luxury hotel on the moon being the excuse for getting us there to do other things as well.

Or a prison...

The construction possibilities are the most exciting though. You don't need chemical rockets to get off the moon, throw something hard enough and it'll go most of the way into orbit or even all the way back to earth. There are plenty of resources there, it's easy to move stuff off of it, and it opens up the possibility for space infrastructure we'd be hard pressed to get off the earth thanks to gravity and the atmosphere. We're talking about the difference between a few tubes stuck together that can hold maybe a dozen people at most and most of the reasonable examples of science fiction space ships with hundreds or thousands of people living aboard.

Also consider. A normal ocean-going freighter takes maybe 2-4 weeks to make it across an ocean. Return from the moon takes less than a week. 3-4 days probably. What if you could have your product(or at least the parts that can be made from moon resources) manufactured and then delivered anywhere on the planet for less than the cost of having it done in one of the traditional manufacturing strongholds, for less cost, no terrestrial pollution, and in 1/4-1/2 the time?

And to note, a lot of this is far future stuff. Maybe not even in our lifetimes (or mine at least). But we don't get to that point unless we get feet there and start figuring it out.

[LordBaal]

Nobody goes to the moon to see the aluminum smelter or the water ice mining teams.

Actually that would be pretty cool to see and can see how it would be part of a moon tour, at least the first years.

I think that having the aluminium at disposal to make further infrastructure and vehicles already in orbit or on a really shallow gravity well would be at the start prohibitively expensive but on the long run would be a huge boon.

[Il Palazzo]

Your position is one of perfect safety-- You cannot be wrong in it.  Since the information you demand does not exist, you can comfortably assert that it is easier on earth, because you do have numbers for that.  With the same stroke, you remove any attempt to collect the data that would contra-indicate your assessment.

One of the reasons to attempt a permanent space presence, is to know what those recurring and actuarial costs of operating one actually are, and to know if further development along that line is reasonable or not.  Right now there is insufficient data to know.

Hey, write me an open check to invest in this doodad I've just thought up, so that your family can buy eggs 5% cheaper. I don't know how much it'll end up costing. And the price reduction might be less than 5% - I don't really know either. It might actually go up even. No, I don't care that you won't eat enough eggs in your entire lifetimes to justify the expense.

You can't logically justify an unspecified (albeit ostensibly huge) expense by a promise of lowering cost of X by an unspecified amount based just on wishful thinking, and call it economic incentive.
And it's not my job to prove to you that it's a bad investment - it's yours to convince the investors (or taxpayers) they can get a return on the investment.

[wierd]

Your position is one of perfect safety-- You cannot be wrong in it.  Since the information you demand does not exist, you can comfortably assert that it is easier on earth, because you do have numbers for that.  With the same stroke, you remove any attempt to collect the data that would contra-indicate your assessment.

One of the reasons to attempt a permanent space presence, is to know what those recurring and actuarial costs of operating one actually are, and to know if further development along that line is reasonable or not.  Right now there is insufficient data to know.

Hey, write me an open check to invest in this doodad I've just thought up, so that your family can buy eggs 5% cheaper. I don't know how much it'll end up costing. And the price reduction might be less than 5% - I don't really know either. It might actually go up even. No, I don't care that you won't eat enough eggs in your entire lifetimes to justify the expense.

You can't logically justify an unspecified (albeit ostensibly huge) expense by a promise of lowering cost of X by an unspecified amount based just on wishful thinking, and call it economic incentive.
And it's not my job to prove to you that it's a bad investment - it's yours to convince the investors (or taxpayers) they can get a return on the investment.

Paleolithic man, to Neolithic man:

So, you want me to hunt for you, and catch dangerous animals ALIVE, so that you can try to hold them in pens, and maybe one day get them to stop trying to gore you to death with sharp horns-- And you also want to forego important gathering hours to dig up dirt and plant seeds that might or might not grow?

I think my time is better spent getting the animals I know how to hunt, and the plants I know where to pick.  Thanks.


In other words, your rhetorical argument is how humans stay in the early stone age, and never invent agriculture.

[Il Palazzo]

(yeah, because that's how domestication happened)
No, my argument is I wouldn't give you money for your snake oil unless you provide evidence it works.