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Comment by ETH_start | Hacker News Reader

This is a good example of a space-based research initiative that might find significant applications on Earth.

I think the key reason that space-based research tends to be so technologically fruitful is that it imposes a discipline on the science done, through the constraints that space imposes on meeting ambitious mission objectives.

Space initiatives also provide a justification for doing the kind of blue skies research that might otherwise find difficulty finding funding.

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The applications on Earth are already realized:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_beam_welding#Equipment

https://rickyswelding.com/best-laser-welding-machine/

Oh, that's excellent

> I think the key reason that space-based research tends to be so technologically fruitful is that it imposes a discipline on the science done, through the constraints that space imposes on meeting ambitious mission objectives.

The enormous budget and the elite scientific and engineering talent also may help. On Earth, those resources don't usually go toward finding a new way to weld things.

It’s a bit weird that NASA are doing the research.

In the next century dozens of corporations bigger than most countries of Earth will be up in space mining millions of tons of gold and other rare materials, tax free anywhere.

It seems they will see the greatest benefit from this research, but they don’t want to pay for it?

I mean I would also choose to just get free stuff. But why are we giving it away?

1. Doing research is exactly the purpose of NASA. 2. I'm highly sceptical of the idea that space mining will be an economically profitable activity in the near future and even more sceptical of the idea that nation states on Earth won't find a way to tax it.

It's probably not super realistic to mine resources in space and send the raw material down the gravity well but it's hard to imagine any space-based manufacturing without mining. Whether our species will ever attempt such a thing is.. who knows? But hauling heavy loads to and from Earth makes very little sense.

> It's probably not super realistic to mine resources in space and send the raw material down the gravity well

I wonder about it: Gravity pulling through zero drag (before the atmosphere) sounds like cheap transportation of just about any mass. We have lots of experience aiming the landing site of deorbiting objects.

How much would the ship cost - can we do it without an engine or fuel, with a little boost in the right direction from an orbital base? What would be needed for the cargo to survive reentry and 'landing' - for exampple, a heat shield? After landing, how much would recovery and transportation of the cargo cost? You don't want to be retrieving it from under 3,000 m of water.

That is an interesting question. Doing it without losing the load seems challenging but could work if you're basically pummeling an area with raw ore then subsequently mining and refining it? I wonder what the atmospheric consequences would be?

Also, the ore may be affected by the heat. It's enough to incinerate many things falling from space.

> I'm highly sceptical of the idea that space mining will be an economically profitable activity in the near future and even more sceptical of the idea that nation states on Earth won't find a way to tax it.

The US has carefully preserved the interests of private space minining companies in international agreements about space.

Look up the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, and the Artemis Accords as a start. Generally it's referred to as 'extraction', if you are searching. Here's a very good resource: [0]

The US delined to sign the Moon Agreement of 1984, at least in part because it designated the Moon (or some part) as the "common heritage of all mankind". The US objected because they said it contradicted free market principles. "Opponents of the Moon Treaty also expressed concerns that one of the goals of the agreement's proposed regulatory regime would be equitable sharing of benefits from lunar resources, as they worried this approach could disadvantage private sector initiatives."

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/salmon-swimming-upstream-chart...

Increased supply will cause prices to fall, meaning the rate of profit will not be too extreme, especially how much easier sending stuff to space is getting

I cant wait, too many rare earths are dominated by BRICS countries

Rare-earth metals are far too plentiful and cheap on Earth to make it profitable to mine them in space and then ship them back to Earth.

Gold and platinum group metals are the only natural resources that could potentially be mined in space and then shipped back to Earth for sale at a profit. Maybe what we could see is such metals seeing their price come down as the supply increases from extraterrestrial sources, and and as a consequence of the resultant increase in abundance of these metals, new applications being found for them, which in turn would increase the productivity of the global economy.

Gold and platinum group metals have a lot of industrial uses that cannot currently be exploited due to their extreme scarcity and expense.

Private companies face a free rider problem in funding publicly available research, in that it's generally better to conserve one's capital and wait for someone else to pay for the research.

And corporations, as a whole, are no where near as large as governments.. government has grown precipitously relative to the private sector over the last 80 years. It's just that that spending growth has been concentrated mostly in social programs rather goods and services that face the free rider problem:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

> It seems they will see the greatest benefit from this research, but they don’t want to pay for it?

The US government also did the research on fracking (i.e., for natural gas extraction), as far as I know.

Back in the late 1950s when NASA was born, the US felt that if the Soviet Union obtained a significant advantage in space technology, it could be an existential threat. The government therefore invested directly in research.

The US still invests in research in nuclear energy and other things. Congress is just now passing laws that will allow the government to recover expenses for private commercial use of its space launch facilities (it's a bit more complex than that, and I don't recall the details).

Maybe it would make sense for anyone commercializing it to pay royalties, at least if they start earning serious revenue.

The most recent Planet Money podcast talks about how the latest microchip innovation was proposed by a nuclear weapons researcher and cost the us government roughly 300-400 million but the engineering research to make a practical ultraviolet etching machine cost ASML nine billion and twenty years of development, they said if they knew it would take that long they might never have attempted it but they are now the sole maker of such devices which seems to have made the investment worthwhile.

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