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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Honestly asking here, are zero-gravity metals and pharmaceuticals 'real'?

As in things that can't be made much cheaper (or at all on Earth) and that companies would jump to create if there was a platform for them?

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So, I don't know about zero-gravity metals and pharma, but space-based mining and manufacturing is absolutely essential for producing large-scale stations, spacecraft, and other things. It costs a ton to put things into space and during that time they're subjected to a considerable amount of force. By building in space, you don't have to build for gravity (look ma, no support structures!) and don't have to concern yourself with the cost of launches.

Imagine building a massive spacecraft for long distance travel. It'd never land on a planet, just go between them; you'd take a shuttle from your planet up to the craft and leave from there. This is possible with space-based manufacturing.

Putting millions of tonnes of material into orbit is an absolutely trivial problem compared to actually making that massive spacecraft travel anywhere meaningful.

Well, once you're already in space, you can use nuclear pulse propulsion without leaving a giant radioactive crater on the earth's surface:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion

You're missing his point entirely. If there's no real market for zero-gravity metals and pharmaceuticals, the whole venture will fail fast because it can't make money.

If all you can do is build more space stuff but the stuff is more expensive than earth stuff then it's not going to work.

Platinum is about $1500 usd per troy ounce.

There are 32 troy ounces in a kg.

People are estimating £1000 per kg to get stuff into LEO. It costs less to get stuff back to Earth.

Surely they only have to beat $50,000 per kg to get the mining equipment up there and get the stuff back and they're in profit.

And they amortise the cost of getting the mining equipment up there over all the kg they mine and return. Since they're talking about 16000000000 kg of asteroid that's a lot of amortising.

And even if it doesn't have direct commercial value it has many other benefits - it is inspiring. Perhaps some children are seeing this and wanting to get into science. That's great.

But maybe I'm wrong, and I really welcome better information.

That only holds up until you start shipping a lot of Platinum down at which point the market crashes. Also, it's £620 or 1,000$ to LEO right now and 100$ /lb to LEO is possible if we scale things up far enough. What NASA found out from the shuttle program is we just don't need that much stuff in space, because once stuff is up there it can stay there for a long time.

Did you like read the thread? Point 6 in cletus' opening argument.

Rare materials will not make you as much money as you can make now because they will become not rare. So you have to make something which only can be made in space or you have to play the De Beers game, be an evil fucker and spend all eternity in hell if it existed.

Platinum is used in a lot of stuff. Catalytic convertors, electronics, but perhaps most importantly in fuel cells. Usage is going to increase dramatically, meaning people will need this stuff. Getting something in space down to Earth surface is not as expensive as escaping Earth gravity.

You really think platinum is going to drop from $50,000 per kg to something like $1,000 per kg before they've made their money back?

You'd have to mine the "long tail" of platinum :)

reduced and zero-gravity environments allow crystals to grow faster, and in more perfect configuration than gravity-bound locations. This could lead to some really interesting metal alloys.

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