What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars? Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.
Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO, let alone get someone to the Moon, we can start talking about whether they'll be able to pull off a Mars mission.
Maybe a bit far fetched, but creating a colony on Mars would be the foundation of creating a new, highly advanced trading partner.
Colonists on Mars would have to deal with extreme environmental conditions and therefore be forced to invest the majority of resources in science and engineering instead of politics and entrenched systems.
Also, martians would be natural space travelers. Mars has a gravity that's less than half of Earth's, so they would get off that rock much easier and they would have a wealth of natural resources through asteroid mining that they could sell to earth together with advanced technology.
After a few centuries the martians would push the technological boundary far beyond what we have now and give Earth the motivation to follow suit to ensure sovereignty.
> After a few centuries the martians would push the technological boundary far beyond what we have now and give Earth the motivation to follow suit to ensure sovereignty.
Native Martians would not be able to invade and occupy Earth on account of their adaption to Mars' much lower gravity. Even aside from them having to handle their weight tripling, they'd be facing major medical issues.
>After a few centuries the martians would push the technological boundary far beyond what we have now and give Earth the motivation to follow suit to ensure sovereignty.
To ensure sovereignty? I'm all for technological progress, but I don't think it should be forced due to a then real threat of a martian invasion. ;)
Invasions, or threats thereof, tend to be excellent incentives for technological progress. Until we hit singularity and/or become radically better as a species, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Come to think of it, America was/is that highly advanced trading partner colony.
The exploration of this side of Earth had its own share of danger and uncertainty. Remember, people back then think the Earth was flat. Traveling far enough is doomed to drop off the edge.
I was with you until the Earth is flat comment - most everyone knew the Earth was round - the thought was that you could get to the Far East by going West.
It's well worth watching Neil deGrasse Tyson on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CJ8g8w1huc "The 3 Fears That Drive Us to Accomplish Extraordinary Things" - if you look closely, the actual successful colonization of North America was driven by private enterprise. I gave a talk on this topic at the last Mars Society convention, in case you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BOOuGUnDek
The comments on that video are diametrically opposed to Neil's view. It's interesting how many fans of his do not share this particular of his sentiments. I wonder if Carl Sagan, his own inspiration, would have supported the nascent commercial space industry. I can't imagine why not.
What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars?
For a company like spacex, the advantages are clear - if they can promote human space flight around the solar system, they stand to earn huge amounts of money providing the infrastructure/launches etc, so promoting a Mars Mission makes a lot of sense for them as a company. Even if it never happens they'd make lots of money from preparation, investigation of launch options and the renewed interest in human space flight. Of course that money has to come from somewhere, but I'm sure any such mission would attract all kinds of science missions and funding from national governments, particularly as it becomes clear they can pull it off.
No-one will make money mining down a gravity well like Mars, but there are plenty of other reasons to go there and to other bodies in the solar system, even if only for short periods for scientific investigations. Of course you can do a lot with robots, and personally were I to be investing I'd invest in orbiters and landers, not human missions. The public would disagree though and national governments are more likely to fund a first man on mars than they are another rover.
I think companies like planetary resources are also interesting as when one of them tows an asteroid back to earth orbit and starts mining and sending lumps of metal with a heat shield back to earth, or mining for reaction mass and selling it in orbit, that might be a game changer.
Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.
I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company, there are lots of examples of private exploration, and many examples of private individuals simply seeking funding from governments for an enterprise they had already decided upon, so it's hardly fair to characterise exploration as uniquely government funded.
Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO
This is already scheduled to happen soon - they're testing human-rated capsules at spacex for example, so it's looking probable over the next few years given the pressure to remove dependence on Russia for the ISS.
>I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company
The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant. Even putting that aside, these are trading companies, not exploration companies. We're not at the point in space travel where exploration can be a nice side-effect yet.
The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant.
They're relevant because they raised private capital in order to explore unknown lands, sometimes very inhospitable ones (HBC). In their initial form they didn't have any of the trappings of state you impute to them, those came later, and are not really very far from the operations of large corporations nowadays many of which are supranational.
The parallels to private exploration of space are obvious, and costs of access to space have fallen dramatically in recent years.
HBC & EIC didn't make money by gathering useful things for sale in Europe. They did it by taking advantage of the people living there, and paying them significantly less for things that were of high value in Europe. There are no local natives to take advantage of to gather items to be sold at a handsome profit in space.
If your time scale is long enough, and your pockets deep enough, there is plenty of money in space in the form of asteroids which could easily be nudged to earth or lunar orbits and mined with robots.
certainly, as there are in the "new world"/"india", they did it cheaply on the back of the know-how(geographic knowledge, on where to go and how to stay alive) and the labour of the indigenous.
The key difference, of course, being that there are no tea or indigo or opium to be gathered on Mars.
The East India Company went exploring because there was money to be made in the places they explored. Those places were full of marketable commodities, many of which were extremely rare in the West and thus could fetch extraordinarily high prices.
If the Moon or Mars were covered in some easily gathered resource that people back on Earth would happily pay top dollar for, private industry would have gone there decades ago. But there's nothing there that's worth the money it would cost to bring it back.
Look at the delta-v required to reach various asteroids. The near-Earth ones are lower than most.
Look at the cost of delta-v per kg of material.
If your target were Mars, and Mars were paved with gold, then gold at $1,800/troyoz is only worth $57,870/kg, meaning that if Mars were paved with gold, it would cost you $942,128 per kg after selling the gold to bring it to Earth.
Then factor everything else into your equations. You'll need drilling and prospecting equipment, you'll have exploratory trips, if you plan on sending up humans you'll need life-support systems and their added mass.
Quite simply, there's nothing material in space that's going to be less-expensively procured for Earth on Earth.
Communications, surveillance, exploration, and research would be the exceptions.
Cost per delta-v is dropping, hopefully by an lot if/when we get reusable rockets. Given that near earth asteroids require dramatically less delta-v than Mars (because no gravity well) and some are high in platinum, iridium and other expensive things it sounds like mining asteroids could be cost effective soon.
I'm not arguing with your numbers, but could you spell out your calculations a bit more? How are you calculating the cost of delta-v per kg?
There's presently no way of constructing or provisioning a rocket entirely in space without first lifting materials (or the entire craft) from Earth. Should there be, whatever costs are associated with that will shift the equation here.
In the meantime, you're stuck with the reality that whatever mass you plan on transporting to the asteroid, and whatever mass is required to haul back your loot, needs to be boosted from Earth's surface to LEO.
The tyranny of the rocket equation dictates what delta-v costs you. Trips with burns at both ends are vastly more expensive than those with burns at only one. So, yes, aerobraking (on return to Earth) is a highly cost-effective method, but that's going to require budgeting for the mass of your reentry shielding and landing mechanism (likely parachutes).
Ultimately, you're looking at a high-speed, high-temperature reentry, atmospheric slowing, and an ultimate soft-ish landing of whatever you've recovered.
While ion rockets have been proposed as vastly more mass-efficient than chemical rockets, existing designs based on xeon rely on an element whose prevalence in known space environments is quite low. The one exception is Jupiter, but that's the second deepest gravity well in the Solar System:
Within the Solar System, the nucleon fraction of xenon is 1.56 × 10−8, for an abundance of approximately one part in 630 thousand of the total mass.[53] Xenon is relatively rare in the Sun's atmosphere, on Earth, and in asteroids and comets. The planet Jupiter has an unusually high abundance of xenon in its atmosphere; about 2.6 times as much as the Sun.
Sure I get that. Landing via parachute remove almost all the return cost. Leaving the cost of a mechanism in space that can run for years, delivering asteroid metal to earth. Its disingenuous to claim a fixed startup cost prevents profiting from what essentially becomes an industrial infrastructure. It costs billions to create a new oil refinery, yet we do it all the time.
Your delta-v for return may be low (60 m/s), though most are higher (see below), but that relies on finding near-earth asteroids with favorable mineral characteristics. You can reduce the mass you're returning _if_ you can refine or reduce it on-site, but that requires additional mass to be transferred out.
Orbital mechanics are far from my forte, but none of this comes cheap, and you're still stuck with costs in the order of $5,000 - $10,000 / kg for Earth to LEO. Which includes the mass of your vehicle, its fuel, and any mining equipment your lugging around.
A catalog of 11,834 NEOs as of yesterday maintained by NASA / JPL shows a minimum delta-v of 3.8 km/s and a high of 26 km/s. Mean is 7.97 km/s, median is 7.1 km/s.
Every mission doesn't have to start from the ground. We don't build a new refinery for every tanker. Make your factory in orbit (or better yet- near the asteroid field). Send the refined metal back.
The deal is, deflect just ONE asteroid to earth orbit, and that's maybe more metal than our civilization has mined so far. The potential is, a new order of society here on earth. The cost - some billions.
"Every mission doesn't have to start from the ground."
I've already addressed that. We do.
"Near the asteroid belt" is meaningless. "The asteroid belt" is huge, and "near" in this case would mean "within a low delta-v orbit". Either way, you're shuttling raw ore or the refining equipment.
There's actually an avenue you haven't proposed: utilizing the asteroid directly for propulsion. There are a few possibilities, including laser ablation (there's a recent PhD thesis on this proposal: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5219/1/2014GibbingsPhD.pdf ), "pebble drives" in which a mass launcher ejects loose material from the asteroid directly (creating potential collision hazards for other craft, though space is big, really mind-bogglingly big), or solar sails using sunlight to alter orbits gradually over a long period of time.
Oh, and per the reference I pulled up, cost per pound wasn't falling appreciably by 2000. Yes, we're another 14, call it 15 years further on. But as the chart on page 4 of the Futron report shows, aside from a big drop in 1992, there was effectively no movement during the 1990s.
Cost is dropping, but even if/when we reduce the costs by 10-20 times (as expected by the rocket reusability plans) then it's still unprofitable.
Even if Santa gave us a free colony of Mars and the rocket costs dropped as much as we hope and Mars was covered with bricks of platinum and iridium - even then it would be economical to simply leave it alone.
Umm, nope, there's absolutely nothing on asteroids that's valuable enough to justify mining them in near future. Even being made of solid platinum or diamonds wouldn't make it profitable. Everything that can be gathered from asteroids can be mined from, for example, the Antarctic or the floor of the ocean which are both simpler and cheaper to reach.
Asteroids and comets will be valuable in so far as they contain plentiful minerals that are already in space. If people want to build bigger things in space then having available materials already in space to build them with would be valuable, and it would (probably/eventually) be cheaper than flying them up. Not to mention more environmentally friendly as mineral processing is a pollution intensive industry.
Sure, but it never happens unless you do these early experiments to find out how e.g. to dock with a comet/asteroid, to attach, what energy budget you expect to need once you're there and so on.
If your goal is to do X in space, then mining asteroids might be a valid means to help you do X, but not an end goal by itself.
Most missions don't need a large supply of water, hydrogen and oxygen located in a random orbit around the sun. If you need them at Mars or Moon, then likely it's easier to find the supplies there instead of spending a large supply of fuel in order to move a large supply of stuff to that orbit.
If we'd need stuff at LEO, it might be that flying to an asteroid (generally far, far away from LEO) and then pushing it to LEO is more efficient than pushing it up from Earth, but it's not so clear.
In any case, this scenario of mining asteroids is very different, I somehow think that the grandparent poster meant mining stuff for us back at Earth.
> True. But we DO know the asteroids are valuable.
The only value of asteroid mining in the forseeable future is to support other off-planet operations, since the only time that getting anything from asteroids will be better than getting it from Earth is if you plan to use it outside of Earth's gravity well.
Parachute it. Drop it like a rock into a lake. Shape it and glide it in. That technology is in its infancy, and will end up unrelated to the cost of lifting delta-V. Its wrong to conflate the two.
Which are all pretty base incentives. We should be going to mars, as a species, for its own sake. The idea that the thing that might justify our first visit to another planet, for some people, might be because it would make good reality TV is just horrifying and saddening and stupefying and should be confronted at every opportunity.
I suppose its true that the private sector doesn't have the traditional governmental incentives of religious persecution, exploitation of indigenous people, proselytization, and banishment of undesirables to encourage them to seek out and colonize new lands. But who knows, maybe we'll come up with other reasons to do it in the future.
> I suppose its true that the private sector doesn't have the traditional governmental incentives of religious persecution, exploitation of indigenous people, proselytization, and banishment of undesirables to encourage them to seek out and colonize new lands.
I disagree. Private sector has those incentives when they lead to making money. Both past and present is full of cases of companies committing atrocities.
Difference being, one can choose to not support companies who slaughter innocents. You cannot choose to back your government. (and voting doesn't work as we've seen with the hypocrisy from Obama.)
You can, it's called migration :). Someone here mentioned "vote vs. exit"; both of them are available in either private or government sectors.
That's in principle of course. In practice, migration is hard and not supporting companies doesn't usually work (boycotts don't really hurt companies in any significant ways).
Monetarily? No benefits, or even negative benefit. Not unless the research leads to the ability to capture one of the thousands of asteroids which contain an upwards of $1 trillion in minerals.
A better question is probably, "What will the consequences be if we limit ourselves to Earth?"
> What will the consequences be if we limit ourselves to Earth?
Very good question, man.
At the rate we're going, both at the rate we're reproducing and the rate we're (mis)using what this planet still has to offer, we better start looking for another location.
Well, that will differ from person to person. My personal incentive to go to Mars is that I want to study its atmosphere, help modify it to become denser and warmer, to be friendlier to life. Others will have different incentives to go, I imagine.
Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO, let alone get someone to the Moon, we can start talking about whether they'll be able to pull off a Mars mission.