I’m just trying to make a point that usually slips past the space groupies that hang around sites like this. (No slur intended, I’m an SG myself, and proud of it).

Unlike tea (clippers to China), or silver (galleons to Mexico), or slaves (caravels to Brazil) or even guano (windjammers to Chile) there is simply nothing out in space that makes economic sense, from an extractive or manufacturing point of view. There is nothing there worth the cost of getting and working there. We don’t even have any idea there might be something there worth a wildly optimistic speculative investment.

That may change, if we find cheaper ways to travel to and work there, or stuff valuable enough to make it worth our while. But for the time being, there is nothing there that makes economic sense, no matter how entrepreneurial we are, or how far seeing we think. Real businessmen, and real stockholders who aren’t space groupies, will not be impressed.

I’m sorry if I misunderstood your point, but bear with me too. Those of us who feel very strongly about space travel’s importance to the long term health and survival of the species need to think clearly and realistically, or we will be dismissed as a bunch of crazy dreamers with nothing worth contributing.

Columbus was a visionary, but he died broke. And people without any of his vision got very rich, and it wasn’t in the spice trade he tried to pioneer, either.

The only spice the New World had to offer was tobacco, a dangerous drug. Things never turn out quite the way you expect them to. In fact, that’s what I’m putting my money on.

Do you want to talk about how long it took to get a load of tea from Shanghai to Liverpool? They did not wait for diesel propulsion to be invented.

Now I’m not championing the idea that there’s a business model out there that will ever make belt asteroids profitable. I’m just pointing out that slow trip time does not destroy that possibility. Hell, that wasn’t even my point – that’s what you morphed my point into (you’ve been hanging around TB too long, buddy). My point was that you do not need rockets to stop a vehicle when it arrives at its destination, providing its destination has a favorable atmosphere.

We cannot conquer the solar system with chemical rockets any more than you can row cargo vessels across oceans. Its that simple. The next forseeable technological steps, fission power, ion drives, and solar sails will allow us to explore, but not exploit industrially, the outer solar system. Permanent settlements and self-sustaining colonies, real space industry, will require another order-of-magnitude advance in technology; perhaps one we haven’t even foreseen.

We may get lucky and be able to leapfrog that gap in a few decades, like the jump from sail to steam. But we cannot guarantee that will happen. We have already picked all the low-hanging fruit on the technological tree. There may be other, better fruit higher in the branches, but we can’t see them and they will require long and expensive ladders.

The best thing we can do now is to spend our limited resources as effectively as possible, a massive program of discovery and exploration using the cheapest robotic techniques possible. We must maximize our chances of stumbling across that one stash of Aztec Gold that will release the massive R and D investment needed to develop the long-shot technologies we need to bring it home.

This is pretty much the plan we’ve been following up to now, and it has yielded immense scientific results at a very modest cost. “Modest cost” is important, or people (and investors) will quickly lose interest. There have been a few deviations that have allowed us to develop techniques and capabilities we’ll need later for manned spaceflight (such as Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Shuttle and the Space Station). These projects have been more experimental and expensive, and the results haven’t been quite as successful, but we need to do them in order to be ready when the breakthrough comes.

Our current efforts in manned space travel will not lead to the breakthrough we will need to become a true spacefaring species. That will come in an industrial or university laboratory right here on earth, and it will be financed and inspired by the entrepreneurial response to data acquired by a robotic probe.

Its going to take time. Technology moves a lot faster today than it did in the 16th century, but the volume of space we need to explore and the energy required to do so have expanded too. But fear not. Neolithic cultures on resource-poor islands conquered the Pacific Basin. Surely we can do better.

Remember, this whole thread is about a business operation on the asteroid belt. We’re talking simple, straightforward, cheap, repeatable operations, an industrial effort, not a one-shot-deal scientific triumph. And every move requires a plan B when the inevitable screw-up happens.

We’re not there yet, and at our current level of technology, we’re not going to be there ever. Now if we achieve a ten or hundredfold increase in exhaust velocity, maybe we could do something.

But although we can’t rule out any new tech that doesn’t violate physical law, neither can we count on it. Right now, chemical rockets can get us to the outer planets. Ion drives, light sails and fission propulsion could make exploration routine. But industrial exploitation is going to require fusion power, at the very least. And we can’t even get that to work here on the ground, much less in a machine that will fit on a spacecraft.

I can’t rule out we might get lucky tomorrow, but today, I don’t want my pension plan investing in this enterprise.

Sure, its technically possible, but we’re talking costs here. It will all come out of profits. Every kg of propellant you need to come home and brake when you get home has to be carried with you on the way out, and that means even more propellant to boost it, and still more propellant to boost THAT. And there’s no aero braking in the belt, so you’ll need still more propellant to stop you when you get there.

The propellant masses quickly become untenable for reaction motors. We need radically different propulsion technology here. Probably nuclear fusion of some sort…And naturally ocurring water or methane ices in the Belt for reaction mass.

Link

This is just one example. They have a press conference this afternoon.