But I don’t think the commodity will be some valuable metal or fuel. I think it will be knowledge. My hopes are on a new life form that will give birth to a whole new biochem industry, or maybe an alien artifact (perhaps an exoplanetary interstellar probe crashed into a Kuiper belt object).

I am convinced there is stuff out there of immense value that we cannot even imagine. But we’ll have to find it first, and recognize its worth. That’s going to take time and money.

The best bet is some microbial life with an exotic chemistry with economic potential. But there are other possibilities. For example, what if there’s a black hole floating around in the asteroid belt? Or a few isolated grams of anti-matter? Or what if we find a source of some isotope which will make efficient fusion reactors (and drives!) easy and cheap to operate?

The alien artifact is admittedly a long shot, but even that would have immense value for whatever a billion year old shipwreck might have still surviving aboard as technology, or data. Can you imagine the value of the ship’s log, with a record of its travels?

Space exploration is basic research. You don’t know what you’re looking for, you don’t have anything specific in mind, but when you find it it may be infinitely more valuable than precious metals. And very often it will be the last thing you expected.

We’re on the same page on that.

The asteroid Psyche is mostly made of iron and nickel, as well as other rare and valuable metals. It’s value has been estimated at $10,000 quadrillion. Orders of magnitude more than the entire world economy. Once that gravity well breakthrough you mention occurs, the gold rush for Psyche and asteroids like it will begin. A probe is on the way to Psyche now. Once its properties are confirmed, its mere existence will drive R&D to break the gravity well.

But its all a moot point anyway. There is nothing in space to attract private investment! If there were gold (or platinum, or plutonium) ingots neatly piled up on the moon’s surface it would cost too much to go there and bring them back. Until some unobtanium propulsion system is developed that will make travel in and out of gravity wells cheap, the idea of developing off-planet resources is a space cadet fantasy.

There are successful and profitable space businesses; telecommunications, earth resources,
geosciences, military, navigation, but they were all initially developed by massive government subsidies. And its always been like this, back in Columbus’ day, he still had to get his ships financed by the Spanish Crown. Even the known wealth of the spice islands and the negro slave coast couldn’t attract enough investment to get the ball rolling. The Portuguese and the Spanish bootstrapped this exploration with government subsidies. Later, when the rumors of gold and dope (sugar, coffee, cocoa, tea, tobacco) started paying off did private investment jump in, and then only in a collective way through the devlopment of companies and market shares.

The only way space travel is going to pay for itself is either some magic new propulsion system will be discovered to make it cheaper, or some fabulously valuable substance we haven’t found yet will be discovered. Right now, we’re spending a lot of government dollars trying to find life in space, because an alternative biology will kick start a whole new plastics and chemicals industry. But the “investment” is all from the taxpayer. If we found life on Mars, or in the ice oceans of the outer satellites, then you would see a veritable gold rush of nations and companies scrambling to get in the game. Until then, nothing is going to happen in the private sector.

I’m not slamming private enterprise, I certainly don’t blame them for not spending money in this area. I certainly wouldn’t invest in a company that was! Speculation like this is why we have governments.

I still support space exploration because I am convinced there is SOMETHING out there worth going after. Maybe it will be microbes in the Martian soil, or brine shrimp from Europa, or an alien extrasolar derelict in the asteroid belt. But until they find it, there will be little investment from the corporate sector. True, individual space groupies like Musk or Bezos may invest their own private fortunes looking for it, but there will be no broad spectrum corporate interest in it. People and governments take bold risks. Companies don’t.

I’m reasonably certain that IM competed against other companies for the NASA contract it got. And yes there were failures on their part, although I can’t say someone forgetting to hit a switch had anything to do with cutting corners to save money. (I hope in fact there is an investigation to determine if there was any deliberate malfeasance here.)

But let’s get real here. The free market has failed many times, but it has also succeeded uncountable times and in immeasurable ways. Pointing to this one failure as an example of an entire economic system sounds like, well, a pious self-serving ideological justification of your own dogma relating to the free market.

If only one company gets the contract from the government, its not free enterprise. Its just business as usual. A lot of this talk about space capitalism is just self-serving ideological justification for sucking on the government teat.
If that’s what its going to take to conquer space, fine, but lets not fool ourselves with pious sermons about the glories of the free market.