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#6676 Re: Human missions » Developing the cis-Lunar economy and infrastructure » 2012-01-12 13:32:31
I'm replying here to try to get both threads back on track.
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic … 89#p111189
I thought a single pole could be covered continuously with just 2 satellites? Mind, we'll need to have a continuous link to EML1... could we get away with a direct link from the Lunar surface, and do away with satellites?
Say we need 3 Lunar sats... how many are we looking at for the Terran side of the operations? A dedicated GEO satellite, or more (we ought to be able to cope with the slight downtime from the eclipse...)? From what I've gathered so far, we're looking at maybe 1 to 6 satellites being required. We're looking at perhaps a billion dollars being required for this, yes, with a lifetime of 10 years?
But surely NASA has Earth covered from all directions with satellite coms, and do we need constant communication with the lunar base? We didn't have that with Apollo did we? There are already satellites in lunar orbit aren't there? eg. the Indian satellite. I am sure the space agencies involved would be pleased to receive retainers amounting to tens of millions per annum?
#6677 Re: Life support systems » 3D Printers » 2012-01-12 07:28:59
Good to know it isn't just me who sees this as something of a step change.
It would be good to get the formula for the plastic they use.
I think I may have a look on You Tube to see whether any backyarders make their own plastic.
#6678 Life support systems » 3D Printers » 2012-01-11 14:25:26
- louis
- Replies: 373
This technology seems to have come along nicely.
A gadget like this would be v. useful for a small colony.
But how easy would it be to produce the plastic I wonder? Could it be produced on a small scale without too much complex machinery. What do you need - carbon, hydrogen, fluorine, iodine??? (just educating myself on Wikipedia...
I wonder whether we (or I) have been too pessimistic about polymer production before now...Surely we could find some way to produce small amounts of plastic.
#6679 Re: Human missions » Developing the cis-Lunar economy and infrastructure » 2012-01-11 09:25:57
The abundance of Pt groups in normal regolith means little. What interests me are foreign objects like chunks of asteroid. Even if only one in a million large impacts leave big enough chunks behind to mine there is still that one in a million.
Before you could mine you'd have to locate your resources. Knowing the 3d structure of craters should help you determine the size speed and angle of the impactor. Ground penetrating radar may be able to identify the location depth and size of any remnants as well as its dielectric constant which will give clues to its composition. When a promising site is located you send a small lander (perhaps a dragon) to preform a test drill and more accurately analyse its composition.
What sort of goodies might be available? Carbon? Iron? Anything else?
#6680 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Creating the Cis-Lunar economy » 2012-01-10 12:39:08
With that much money perhaps you can buy a single, medium-to-small off-the-shelf comsat. If you get a really nice deal, that is.
Criticising the budget is somewhatdifference from saying there is no budget. I think in terms of coms, NASA has so much in place that we would not be reinventing the wheel. Perhaps you would need some small lunar satellite or two (I don't know)...But generally I think we are talking about marginal costs on top of NASA's coms budget.
I agree with you here, the fuel is basically "free" once you pay for everything else. Which is not to say it isn't going to be incredibly expensive in the real world anyway, we are talking about a lot of infrastructure to build at the end of an, at best, expensive supply chain (that right now is inexistent, of course). And robot controlling a rover from earth doesn't mean it is for free. Check out how much manpower it takes to keep the little mars rovers moving around and sniffing rocks.
I don't think anyone is hoping to get this on the cheap. The issues is whether the high costs can be covered.
I think the lunar mining rovers would be much easier to control from Earth. Their job is a relatively simple one and should be virtually fully automated. I think the job on Earth would be a monitoring one and possibly sending other rovers to help any rovers that get stuck. Obviously this is highly speculative, but the fact that the Mars Rovers are still going strong after so many years suggests perhaps it won't be quite as difficult as people think - it's just on Earth there is no real financial incentive to use such automated rovers.
#6681 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Creating the Cis-Lunar economy » 2012-01-10 10:16:49
It's kind of cute how you all forget the ground and communications infrastructure. In order to pull any of this off, you need constant two-way communication between all the pieces of your puzzle, for starters. So make it a few (3+spares) geosynchronous satellites, a couple of ground rely and tracking stations (and only a couple because of the sats), and a lunar orbit satellite constellation (quite extensive if you want to cover the poles, tens of birds at the very least). All of which need monitoring from real people on the ground, and eventual replacement (10 years is a good average for the life of a comsat, and the cost of a single engineer job for that amount of time is greater than the sat's, but the same order of magnitude).
Not to mention the couple of space stations you are suggesting here and the abundant traffic of fuel tugs (which do wear out). BTW, Terraformer, how many tons of propellant produced for each one delivered to LEO? And to LLO? And by what (I hope) single stage method? Just curious to see how the fuel economics would work, maybe you end up needing a huge powersource on the ground to support all of this activity (and more mining gear, and more crew to handle it, and so on), maybe you can make do with less. Also, am I correct in assuming you envision two fuel depots/transfer stations, one in LEO and the other in LLO, with all the fuel supplied from the moon? If so, consider the trade with a single station in L1, in terms of launch windows. Something like once every two weeks from a particular orbital plane in LEO to a particular orbital plane on the moon, IIRC? No idea off the top of my head, really, but I do know L1 is accessible once every orbit, which is 90-something minutes in LEO, or pretty much anytime in other words (once a day from the ground).
In any case, expect a ground support staff of the approximate size of ISS's, if a government is involved, way more if several are. Even a SpaceX-style with "eight guys on a trailer" will become huge quickly, regulatory hurdles aside. I won't get into revenue, 'cause that's frankly not my thing. Somebody else hunt for the contracts, I like the challenge of design.
Rune. The little inconvenient middle steps are a bitch.
It's kind of cute how you didn't read my post: "maybe $200 million for dedicated communications and sundry items. "
The point about coms is that much of that is wrapped up in the launch costs (i.e. they don't charge you extra for that) and part is wrapped up in the lunar hab infrastructure cost. To the extent that
there may be additional costs they may be marginal - NASA already has much of the coms in place in terms of ground stations and so on. Moreover the more launches you have, the less your unit costs will be for ground control - so we might actually see launch costs fall further.
My infrastructures were based on a 10 year time frame, so that is covered.
I think we will need a fuel operation but I think a lot of that could be robotised and automated, so essentially the base is just taking delivery of fuel supplies. That part of the project will of course be more demanding.
I may have neglected the transit fuel issue a bit...I guess that is a bit debatable, as to whether there are real costs there. I am not sure there are - there are no taxes, rents, licences, road tax, raw material costs etc on the Moon. The real question is: can you make fuel on the Moon and how much does the infrastructure to do so cost? Getting the infrastructure there will certainly be expensive.
If anyone would like to give an estimate tonnage and estimate cost of manufacture for fuel-making equipment on the moon, I would be interested to hear it. I guess I am thinking of something like rovers controlled from Earth that go to ice areas and harvest the ice...
How much fuel would we need to collect? How many rovers would that take?
#6682 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Reusable Rockets to Orbit » 2012-01-09 18:03:22
Firstly, on the cost of SpaceX rockets: Just check out their website. For all the technical information on stage mass etc. that SpaceX doesn't give, they are very clear about how much one of their rockets costs. As of right now, you can buy a Falcon 1e (1,010 kg to LEO) for $10.9 million, a Falcon 9 (10,450 kg to LEO) for $54 million to $59.5 million, and a Falcon Heavy (53,000 kg to LEO) for $80 million-$125 million. That's a price to LEO of $10,792/kg, $5,167-$5,694/kg, and $1,509-$2358/kg, respectively.
My goal here is to talk about designs that can enable costs to LEO below $100/kg. Now, that's still not cheap; It would still cost multiple tens of thousands of dollars for a ticket to orbit. However, given the prices as they currently exist it is very cheap by comparison.
I don't know where government designed rockets are coming into this, but I have no doubt that the currently planned heavy lift rockets will fail to lower costs significantly in much the same way as past rockets have.
I do think that $100 per kg is actually very cheap, unbelievably cheap, given what you are doing...you wouldn't expect to get to the top of Mount Everest for $10 would you?
My own view is that if you get down to $1000-2000 per kg with reliable rockets, a whole new world opens up - we just don't realise it yet because investors are conservative when it comes to billion dollar investments! But eventually someone is going to get the formula right.
#6683 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Creating the Cis-Lunar economy » 2012-01-09 16:53:35
I suppose the question is how do we get from Musk's figure of $2000 per kg to LEO, to $40,000 per kg for reaching the lunar surface. Break down the job, and I think you have to ask where does the additional $38,000 per kg come from. Of course there are development costs for the infrastructure - for the transfer vehicle, for the lunar lander and for the lunar hab. Let's assume those costs are covered...a big assumption perhaps, but I think the key is to look at the operational costs, then it is simply a case of adding in a reasonable amortised sum for the production of the infrastructure to find out if you have a viable business plan. If we assume a lifetime of 10 years for the infrastructure, perhaps we are covering real infrastructure costs (excluding development costs) of say
$100 million for a transit vehicle, $200 million for a lander (descent and ascent), $100 million for lunar hab and lunar ISRU and maybe $200 million for dedicated communications and sundry items.
Let's spread that at $60million per annum.
Operationally, I can't see we need to transfer more than 1000 kgs per person for each visit.
Assume the cost to LEO is $2000 per kg.
The $60 million per annum capital cost would amount to only $300 per kg when spread over the whole year (200,000 kgs being launched).
Lunar staff salaries would be not very significant. Let's assume 20 staff on rotation and a salary of $200,000 per annum - that's only $10million, or $50 per kg.
But perhaps we should add another 20 staff to cover ISRU maintenance on the lunar surface - adding another $50 per kg and perhaps adding 10% to the tonnage launched.
The annual cost might come in at around 220,000 kgs X $2,400 = $528 million. Perhaps add on contingencies of 30% for safety = $760million
At a $20 million ticket price, the ticket revenue 160 x $20 million would equal = $3200 m
So, I think perhaps we should look at a more sustainable ticket price of $5 million = $ 800 m.
That would give a shortfall of $40 million.
We've already seen a variety of revenue earning ideas:
I think we could see significant revenue:
Spreading of ashes - $50 million
Romantic tokens - $20 million
Sale of lunar jewelry - $50 million
Sale of lunar regolith and meteorites - $50 million
Scientific experiment services for
universities etc - $100millon
Sponsorship - - $50million
Sale of TV rights - $30 million
That gives a total of $320 million or a surplus of $280 million per annum.
#6684 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Creating the Cis-Lunar economy » 2012-01-09 13:15:28
Gar, I know it's called "Martian" Politics and Economy, but...
I thought, in the spirit of louis's thread, I'd start one about the Lunar economy. I apologise for the lack of cites, but I can't find much information about the number of people who tried going to the ISS as tourists (there's been 8 trips total, but obviously not everyone who wants to gets to go?), no-ones built a capsule optimised for down cargo yet etc...
The thread is based on the infrastructure I described in my thread on the matter being that way (LEO and EML1 stations, base, and transit craft) - http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6080. I've tried to be pessimistic.
Assumptions:
To get a rough Lunar base that can expand (i.e. build habitats, basic equipment etc) using predominantly in-situ resources will cost around $5 billion - possibly higher, but probably not lower. This is an upfront capital cost which will need to be paid back, say over a period of 10 years, so we need to make $500 million/year to cover this cost.
Costs to orbit are $2000/kg (that is, Musk manages to pull it off) and due to existing rockets in orbit and Lunar fuel, costs to the Lunar surface are $2500/kg.
The cost per person to orbit will be $20 million (based on this - 1600/(12*7) gives the figure, though this may be significantly lower... or higher, since it's only cargo resupply they're doing).
Costs of down cargo will be $2000/kg (at the moment, there's not much focus on this, so I can't provide a cite - but we're talking about a capsule that is little more than a heat shield and guidance system).
There will be 20 people each year who will be willing to pay $40 million for a 3 month stay at the Lunar base ($20 million of which will be spent on getting to orbit themselves).
Volatiles for fuel and life support (food, oxygen and water) will retail in LEO for $500/kg.
There will be a total crew of 10 on the surface, and 5 in each of the stations, and they will be rotated every 3 months (requiring 12 launches of Dragon each year... ouch).
Mining will not be economically profitable for another decade or so.
The total cost for this will be about $2 billion for all the manned flights, plus perhaps a Falcon Heavy launch for extra equipment and such - call it $100 million - plus the aforementioned $500 million for paying back the capital costs. Total gross annual income required to break even = $2.7 billion, with a ROI of 10 years. Call it, then, $3 billion required each year.
Now, how to make that money. I've already raised tourism as a possibility - make it self catering, so we don't have to provide any full time staff (though perhaps they will be able to take a few trips on the rocket-hoppers). 20*20 gives $400 million as the revenue that can be generated from this.
Now, sale of moon rocks. Yes, I know that the price will come down, and people will be expecting it to, which itself will bring the price down... but if we're talking about small rocks, set into jewellery, then the fact that you own a ring that contains one of the very first piece of Luna returned by the small toehold base there has a rarity value all of it's own. I would not at all be surprise if basic, raw, Lunar rock can retail for about $100/g when set into rings, especially if we keep the price high. The advantage of this is that it doesn't require any refining to be done on orbit - the stuff can be delivered directly to Terran jewellers, who will polish it and set it. For those guys who want to propose to their girlfriend in a different, romantic, out of this world way... I reckon about 20 tonnes of this stuff can be sold each year at $100k/kg, in which case we can neglect return costs. That would be enough for maybe 20,000 pieces of jewellery, and more importantly, $2 billion in the pockets of the Lunar Development Corporation. Hmmm, that doesn't sound right, given that it's nearly a 4% slice of the US market (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/repor … hat_where)). I really don't know if we'd be able to get more, or less, money from this. I'm sticking with my unsustainable assumption though, in the hope that by the time it fails, we'll be able to be making money from mining and other industries.
That leaves a mere $600 million to be made up from volatiles sales. At $500/kg, that's 1200 tonnes that need to be sold, leaving us dependent upon vigorous activity in orbit. Bearing in mind that that's enough to provide all the fuel for several Mars missions...
So there you have it - an unbalanced economic model that may or may not work (if we can make it breakeven with restrictive assumptions, though, anything else is pure profit). Responses appreciated.
I looked into this a few years ago and I have absolutely no doubt that a lunar base would generate huge surplus revenue. Just imagine the pulling power of being able to take a rover trip to see the Apollo 11 landing site. What a tourist attraction that will be (and it will need to be preserved of course!). All the Apollo landings (six?) will be the subject of great interest.
I agree about the value of lunar rocks and the scope for developing lunar jewelry.
I think there are two other major earners that should not be overlooked:
1. Use as a resting place for ashes. Imagine being able to think of your loved one as being in some sense present on the moon when you gaze on it in the night sky. Not something I would opt for myself but I am convinced hundreds of millions of people on Earth would find it an attractive option in terms of remembrance. People might not send the whole of the ashes - perhaps only a few grams but I think a charge of up to $5000 will still find a market. So $100 per gram is certainly achievable and the operational costs apart from carriage will be minimal.
2. A focus for romantic couples - perhaps lovers could have their name engraved on a light metal plate which is taken to the moon, and secured in a "Lover's Garden" . Again a charge of $100 a gram or more would be feasible. This could appeal to hundreds of millions.
Also don't forget - sponsorship and TV rights which combined would probably be well over a billion dollars.
#6685 Re: Human missions » Mars Direct 2007 » 2012-01-09 13:00:34
Thinking like suspenders-and-belt is how you survive in space. I would definitely try some fuel production on the first landing. I would not count on it in any way for the return from that first landing.
Question: why is everybody still focused on one trip-one landing? Why not make one trip and several landings? It's a lot of trouble to go there. Why not make it really worthwhile?
GW
I favour two landings - three people in each lander (total six people). I'd like to see a doubling up in Mars inhabitants every two years with each new wave of settlers buiding habs for those that follow.
I also favour several pre-landings with robot craft. These would land supplies and I think a fuel production unit if that could be operated robotically (obviously that would need a lot of research, but I don't see why not. Alternatively, land some fuel.
I certainly don't think Mission 1 should rely on ISRU fuel production, but it should begin fuel production. There must however be a guarantee of getting off the planet.
#6686 Re: Human missions » Mars Direct 2007 » 2012-01-08 21:04:22
So what is the volume of the Mars Analog sites run by Mars Society? How does it compare to what is proposed for long duration living?
Another place to look at for size to people and duration you could also look at a submarine.....Have a look at this Mars Life Support Systems paper by Donald Rapp
http://marsjournal.org/contents/2006/00 … 6_0005.pdf
That's a v. good point SpaceNut...I am fairly confident that submarine personnel get by on far less volume space than ISS personnel and for months on end.
Thanks for reminding me about the example of submarines. 
#6687 Re: Human missions » Mars Direct 2007 » 2012-01-08 17:15:35
Louis- the difference between the Apollo landers and a Mars mission is quite simple: Duration. The longest of the Apollo missions (Apollo 17) were in the LEM for about 3 days, 3 hours, while the shortest (Apollo 11) spent just 21.5 housed there. A Mars mission is going to last about 550 days, about 180 times longer than the time the Apollo crew spent inside the LEM.
By the way, the LEM had closer to 7 m^3 than 6. .
I understand the difference, but you didn't qualify your reference to survival. That said, I see no reason why - in terms of volume - you couldn't survive for a very long in that amount of space.
I think in any case you are misunderstanding what I am proposing. The hab space for the Mars transit can be quite large - connect the lander to the Bigelow style hab. I am not so concerned about that. But in terms of what we put on the surface, then I think the main hab should not be too large. There will be no shortage of space - they will have the whole planet to explore, and there should be a farm hab as well.
I had a friend once who accidentally got locked in a locker. The locker as about 1.5 m high by say .4 meters deep and about the same wide. That's a volume of .24 m^3. He was in there for about an hour and he managed to remain relatively calm until the fire department came to get him out (He, a few other friends, and I were volunteering at a gymnastics competition on the weekend so the regular custodial staff was not present to open the locker). However, this does not mean that I can extrapolate and say that the bare minimum is a quarter of a cubic meter per crewmember..
Did anyone ask him what he was doing in the locker?
Anyway, it's a redudant debate in that I am not suggesting they have the bare minimum. I am suggesting they get about 16 cubic metres each.
I like GWs suggestion much better as a way to figure minimum volume. I'm going off wikipedia for all these, by the way, if you would like to know my sources. Interestingly, Mir actually had a pretty significant pressurized volume: 350 m^3 of pressurized volume for a standard crew of 3, though it apparently could hold 6 for up to one month. I don't think that's necessarily based much on habitable volume, though. The Salyuts were much more compact, having between 30 and 50 m^3 of pressurized volume per person, some of which would have been used for instrumentation etc. Skylab had about 106 m^3 per person. The ISS actually has the most, at 140 m^3 of pressurized volume for each of its 6 crew. Salyut 6 was one of the smaller Salyuts, and the longest time spent on it was 185 days. I would say that we would be looking at perhaps 35-40 m^3 per person for the Mars mission. For 6 people, this gives a total volume of (Get this!) 210-240 m^3. This is right in line with the Hab as per Mars Direct.
The differences between a treehouse and a hab to be used in a mars mission are numerous. The first two that spring to mind are that children are significantly smaller than adults and that you do not have to spend all of your time inside the treehouse.
It sounds like you're suggesting that people spend all of their time in a space that is absolutely tiny. 20 feet by 20 feet is about the size of my dorm room (intended for 3 people to sleep in uncomfortably), maybe including the closet and part of the bathroom. Maybe. I can absolutely promise you that you cannot house 6 people in that room every minute of every hour of every day without someone going at someone else's throat.
You should take a look at the slums of Manila for close living. People there live day in day out in very cramped conditions. They survive quite happily most of them. Obviously our crew are going to have the best nutrition and hygiene systems.
I am really not sure what you think the problem with close living is. As long as you have heat, light, food, water, hygiene facilities etc there's no problem, as long as you have the right pyschological attitude. We would of course favour compact individuals - probably no taller than 5-5 and no heavier than 140 lbs. That's good all round as they eat less.
I am not a fan of looking at previous space habs as a model. I prefer the Musk approach. Identify the minimum that has to be done - the most cost effective approach and create something new out of that. Besides you really need to sort out your thinking between transit hab, lander hab and surface hab. They are not necessarily the same and in my view should NOT be the same.
#6688 Re: Human missions » Mars Direct 2007 » 2012-01-08 15:35:32
Why not use the experience we have from Mir, Salyut, and Skylab, as well as ISS? The unique one was Skylab. Alone of all of them, there was a huge open space in which to live. That would be an upper design bound on volume per person. I'd use Salyut and/or Mir as a lower design bound on volume per person. ISS falls in-between, and seems a tad crowded sometimes, with 6 on board.
What that says is any crew module for the long ride to/from Mars is going to be a big one. Not necessarily really heavy, but voluminous. There needs to be some real elbow room inside, like Skylab, and some spaces where individuals can go to get away from everyone else. I's suggest a few Bigelow-type inflatables docked together would be the most practical way to launch it, using Falcon-Heavy at $800-1000/pound. I'd also suggest recovering it and using it on subsequent missions to Mars and elsewhere.
GW
It seems to me that we need to keep the descent/ascent vehicle as small as possible. The way I see it, we should think in terms of
A. An MTV Hab (maybe like a Bigelow)
B. A descent and ascent lander. Perhaps a larger version of the Apollo lunar lander.
C. A Mars surface hab.
A and B would be assembled in LEO together with the rocket and supply module, forming in total the MTV. I would have three person MTVs, so for a 6 person mission, there would be two MTVs.
C would be landed robotically.
On reaching the surface, the Crew of the lander would perform an EVA and activate the inflatable/expandable Mars Hab which would then become the main living space with the landers acting as emergency accommodation.
Of course this proposal depends on fairly accurate landing - we need ground transponders interacting with satellites and teh lander vehicle to ensure we get in the zone.
#6689 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Falcon 1 & Falcon 9 » 2012-01-08 11:59:02
I just saw something funny in the public manifest over at spacex.com, check it out:
http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php
It's this part, specifically:
Bigelow Aerospace 2015 Falcon 9 Cape Canaveral
Never mind the fact they are planning to launch 14 rockets that same year, 13 of them Falcon 9's... they have one booked with Bigelow! And it's no Dragon flight, so they are taking hardware up. And here I though they didn't have anything sized for spacex's rockets. It seems we get an inflatable ~10mT space hab in three years. First piece of a commercial station, or further testing of the hardware after so many years without building one? (And firing half the company that built them, too).
Rune. Hope that manifest is actually accomplished. 13 10mT launches... that's a lot of payload. More than China did this year, or anyone else for that matter (though the entire US market comes close if you count the last shuttles, I just checked).
Is it going to be the MTV hab?
#6690 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Mars Economic Activity » 2012-01-08 11:52:52
6. Meh, maybe. How much do networks pay to air the Olympics? Once again unlikely to contribute significantly to total mission cost, regardless.
7. Also a maybe. Depends how you do it, I guess, and what you market it as.
8. Fortunately, the wine market is one on which we can obtain substantial information because high-quality wine is a relatively large market. The Huffington post has compiled a slideshow of the most expensive bottles of wine ever. If you were to sell a bottle of wine for $200,000, it would be the fourth most expensive bottle of wine ever sold. Let's be realistic: Mars wine is not going to be some super-high quality thing. It's going to be average at best. It is not going to garner $200,000/bottle (very similar to the per-kilo price). I think we're looking more at a thousand dollars per bottle and per kilo, maximum. Probably not worth producing.
9. While it's not unheard of to have watches of a hundred thousand dollars or more, I can't imagine that there is a market for 5,000 watches which will likely be of inferior quality (We don't have all these fancy bells and whistles on Mars that we can make on Earth. I suppose the frame could be made on Mars and the fancy gizmos added later, though at a significantly reduced profit. That said, according to this article it's not completely beyond the scope of possibility if a good product can truly be made. I don't know if the profit would be as much as you suggest, and of course you also need a launch infrastructure, though we've commented on that before. I don't know how resource intensive it would be to make the watches. This is however a venue where martian watches may be able to raise some good money.
10. Erm.... what? I don't quite understand what you're talking about, but you don't need reality for a VR experience and it would be quite difficult to actually extract a profit from that.
11. By year 20 it might be first starting, maybe. Several hundred million dollars per year is simply ludicrous. Nobody has that kind of money.
6 . NBC (only one TV company - presumably others in different parts of the world buy into this) is paying about $1.3 billion per Olympic year over three Olympic. So I think that would be a benchmark. What other event might keep hundreds of millions of people glued to their seats over an extended period? And there is lots of opportunity to steal a march on your network rivals with your exclusive news reports from Mars. "Tonight we go live to the Mars base to hear how the colonists are faring." The USA with its love of the founding fathers sort of stuff would lap it up I think.
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/story … ights.html
7. An exploration of the Valles Marianensis (spelling) would be stunning... even robot air ships would supply valuable news footage as new discoveries are made. I think there would be a big ongoing market for TV rights.
8. Well, I don't know if anyone has done experiments in the lab with perfect soil, perfect light and perfect water intake, as to whether you can then produce perfect grapes to make a perfect wine! I doubt it would be tried much on Earth, since it would be very expensive. But on Mars, we are going to have farm habs with such controlled conditions, and the wine doesn't have to be more than exceptionally good for it to command a high price because of the Mars connection. However, I would accept this is maybe not worth worrying about too much.
9. We've discussed.
10. Well I think this would be a big earner. My conception is this: you transfer in high quality the visual data for an area of the Mars surface - of course you have the 15 minute delay between Mars and Earth time. Back on Earth you have a Mars Experience Centre. Kids get to dress up in space suits. They enter the virtual reality room. There is an analogue for the surface - soil and rocks have been created, The rocks are in the same position as on Mars. The visual data is used to create a virtual reality experience on 3D screens. Or perhaps it's all done on 3D VR helmets. But anyway, we integrate the VR data with real rocks on the ground in the simlator area and a real (small) digger in the room which can be operated by the visitors.
The operations of the digger are recorded digitally and sent back to Mars where a similar robot digger actually performs the operations on Mars...perhaps people get to spell their names with big letters of something like that. Or they can draw on a screen with a robot arm.
So back on Mars the actions of the robot digger are recorded visually. That visual record is then sent back to Earth and is a "take home" present for the participant.
Hope that's a bit clearer: it's a virtual reality experience but linked to actual movements on Mars that replicate those of the visitor on Earth.
11. Well it wasn't several hundred millions per person. It is a longer term thing, I would agree. But I think the demand will be there among the super-rich. You have no idea how bored they get!
#6691 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Mars Economic Activity » 2012-01-08 08:39:14
Louis- First, a general statement of my position on your position on these various income streams: Nearly all of them (with the exception of luxury watches and precious metals) depend on the colony or the mission's ability to market itself as a brand as opposed to the default, given the history of such megaprojects a collective endeavor of humanity. Whether that can be done depends in part on external circumstance and in part on the competence of the people running the public relations section of the operation. I view your numbers as the most optimistic possible case of this interaction (and even then sometimes overstated). Of the ones you have mentioned thus far, I would suggest that watchmaking is the most practical as a method for the colony to make money. I have a couple ideas of my own, which I'll mention at the end of this post, once I've finished commenting on yours.
With regards to meteorites- Do you have a citation for either the increase in supply beyond that which was occurring already or the historical prices of meteorites? I am not aware of any such trends and they were not cited in your initial post. Therefore, I cannot give an intelligible response to the phenomena of which you speak. At the very least, you recognize that in microeconomics as it is generally accepted does not say that increasing supply increases price. In fact, standard economics says exactly the opposite. It's one of the few predictions of economics which can actually be regarded as fairly reliable, IMO.
The correct way to look at this is not to look at how much money is out there. Because economics is not a science, this does not translate in any predictable manner into sales. The best way to predict sales is to look at the closest analogue market in existence today. I argue that this is the meteorite market, and gave prices in accordance. If you have meteorite production figures, as you claim, then it will become clear whether this is an accurate comparison in terms of the similarity of the markets.
An endowment is money to be used by the university, but it is supposed to last essentially forever. That means you can't just spend it all. Further, if that money is going to pay to bring things up to Mars, it's not profit for the colony, it's an expense, and the university is a drain on the resources of the colony when a nontraditional education system will probably benefit the colony more in terms of efficiency and producing people able to contribute to the colonial economy in ways that are needed to generate expansion.
With respect to watches, I was actually agreeing with you, albeit in a somewhat lukewarm way. I regard your figure of 5,000 watches for $100,000 each as a tapped out market, simply because there is competition and not everybody is going to want to buy a Martian watch. Obviously if the watches are not quality products they're not going to sell, and there is obviously going to be a loss of profits. However, even if only 5% of that can actually be obtained (This is not my best estimate, I know nothing about the profit margins of watchmakers), $25 million/year should be enough to sustain a fair sized colony.
I don't doubt that there is Gold on the planet. I don't even doubt that there might be a couple places where it can be found in a relatively accessible place on the surface. However, I do doubt that it will be possible to find these places easily (a planet is a big place, after all). Keep in mind that Mars, being farther from the Sun, is relatively less enriched in heavy elements. Further, having had water and vulcanism for a much shorter time than Earth, there is much less opportunity for really rich mineral veins to have formed.
Material being brought back is not arbitrary. The samples that are brought back will be chosen for prime scientific interest. This is absolutely vital for the future of the colony, because a good understanding of the geology involved in the formation of Mars and local regions will provide a great basis for an understanding of what is and isn't likely to be there, as well as where to look for it and where to send the next few exploration missions to maximize science returns.
Wrt Olympic Sponsorship- Given the numbers supplied, I accept that there is some scope for sponsorship in return for the privilege to use the "Mars" brand in the case that such a brand is successfully created.
Wrt Warren Buffet- He does not expect any return for the money he gives away. If you're supplying a product and asking for money for it, it has to be worth the money. I strongly doubt that that will be. Like many of your other suggestions, this is essentially a gimmicky way of getting money that is essentially charity instead of a way to provide a firm economic foundation for the growth of the colony. This applies to anything where you are trying to cash in on a supposed "Mars brand." Keep in mind that Mars will eventually become common place ("Of course we have an outpost in Antarctica/Mars/North America"), and at that point if the colony does not have a good or service of actual economic value to provide, its growth will cease and the colony will fail economically.
In terms of providing an actual good or service to people on Earth, I have a couple of suggestions:
Firstly, of the ideas you mentioned I liked the watch idea the best; even if it is based partially on the idea of people buying things solely because they come from Mars, it does provide a good for which there is an established market.
Secondly, I once heard a newmars user (I don't remember who) suggest that Mars dust would be a very good catalyst for reactions involving ferric catalysts, because of its immense surface area per unit mass. I can't comment on cost or profit, but I think it's at least an interesting idea. This website suggests that we might get $1,000/tonne or so, so that's not a very practical way to make money for the colony.
Thirdly, I think there could be some market for a hosting backup service at the colony. Obviously it's not practical to do primary hosting for data there, but Mars makes a phenomenal backup for people who want to keep their information absolutely hack-proof. After all, it's awful hard to crack into any database on a delay of several minutes at the minimum. This makes Mars's distance from Earth into a benefit instead of a liability.
Fourthly, capitalizing on a similar characteristic, Mars could offer a savings account for people who have money that other countries dispute. This would be similar to swiss banks. There are some potential ethical issues with this (The Swiss ended up holding a lot of Nazi money, and in the modern world this probably means you're holding the money of people like Saddam Hussein and Assad, or of smaller criminals who want to evade the law). I don't know how practical this is, since they would probably not have the cash money held on Mars and thus they would not be entirely politically immune.
Fifthly, more in line with traditional aerospace thought, there is the supply of fuel for LEO infrastructure from phobos. This would be in competition with similar lunar facilities, but Phobos could flood the fuel market at bi-yearly intervals with the raw materials from phobos, assuming that the correct materials can be found there out of which to make rocket fuel, for refueling satellites, for example, as well as whatever is going on in LEO at the time.
Luxury watches are not the only luxury good that Mars could make. In fact Mars jewellery is probably a simpler process that could be worked on first and could pay huge dividends.
I can't find any firm figures for you on meteorite supply and price but this is the sort of thing (wikipedia) that led me to make the claim:
"In 1986–87, a German team installing a network of seismic stations while prospecting for oil discovered about 65 meteorites on a flat, desert plain about 100 km southeast of Dirj (Daraj), Libya. A few years later, a desert enthusiast saw photographs of meteorites being recovered by scientists in Antarctica, and thought that he had seen similar occurrences in northern Africa. In 1989, he recovered about 100 meteorites from several distinct locations in Libya and Algeria. Over the next several years, he and others who followed found at least 400 more meteorites. The find locations were generally in regions known as regs or hamadas: flat, featureless areas covered only by small pebbles and minor amounts of sand.[26] Dark-colored meteorites can be easily spotted in these places, where they have also been well-preserved due to the arid climate, and in the case of the Dal al Gani meteorite field, favorable geology consisting of basic rocks (clays, dolomites, and limestones) and lacking erosive quartz sand.[27]
Although meteorites had been sold commercially and collected by hobbyists for many decades, up to the time of the Saharan finds of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most meteorites were deposited in or purchased by museums and similar institutions where they were exhibited and made available for scientific research. The sudden availability of large numbers of meteorites that could be found with relative ease in places that were readily accessible (especially compared to Antarctica), led to a rapid rise in commercial collection of meteorites. This process was accelerated when, in 1997, meteorites coming from both the Moon and Mars were found in Libya. By the late 1990s, private meteorite-collecting expeditions had been launched throughout the Sahara. Specimens of the meteorites recovered in this way are still deposited in research collections, but most of the material is sold to private collectors. These expeditions have now brought the total number of well-described meteorites found in Algeria and Libya to over 2000.
As word spread in Saharan countries about the growing profitability of the meteorite trade, meteorite markets came into existence, especially in Morocco, fed by nomads and local people who combed the deserts looking for specimens to sell. Many thousands of meteorites have been distributed in this way, most of which lack any information about how, when, or where they were discovered. These are the so-called "Northwest Africa" meteorites."
I think you can agree that the picture here is of rising supply but also rising value and profitability. Markets rarely operate as dictated in text books. Demand is a completely theoretical concept until converted into a sale at a particular price. In a collectors' market there isn't necessarily resistance to price increases, since the collector stands to gain from a rising market. (That's why collecting can be subject to "bubble" behaviour as with the tulip price boom a few centuries ago.)
I think you have to understand a lot of people collect them as well - even after the initial demand of the universities has been met I think there will be a healthy market of people prepared to pay $100 a gram for meteorites from Mars, to top off their collections with a spectacular from Mars. .
Your claim about endowments lasting forever is plain wrong. It depends on the terms of the endowment.
The idea that the colonists need to bring back the material to determine what's there is a bit daft. I think they will be able to identify the stuff they are interested in: iron ore, silica, aluminium, basalt etc back at base. There will be rarer stuff that they can bring back. But there is no reason why it shouldn't be sold to a research institution rather than given away.
The idea that people won't be interested in the Mars brand can be dismissed I think. I notice how on BBC News Mars stories nearly always shoot straight to the top of the most visited poll. Companies like Rolex and Coca Cola get a huge impact through the association. They build up to it over several years and then go for a real publicity blitz around the time of the launch and landing. But the association can carry on afterwards...I think companies would get great value out of it. Nike and other footwear companies would be desperate to get the sponsorship - imagine shots of the colonists at the base in Nike footwear... My view is it could be much bigger than the Olympics. Maybe closer to 2 billion. I was being conservative there.
I've mentioned data transfer myself before and I agree that could be huge. Essentially anything that can be transferred electronically or even on chips, could be a base for economic activity. I think longer term, that outfits like architects and designers, will want to work from Mars. They may find it an inspiring environment. If the colony can subsidise the transfer of people, they may find it v. cheap to operate their businesses from Mars, with no taxation, no rent etc.
I am not sure about the Mars bank providing a financial haven for dodgy operators...ethical issues in abundance.
#6692 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Mars Economic Activity » 2012-01-07 21:21:23
Second 4. Also unrealistic. These universities have no reason to have a mars branch, the costs of transportation being what they are. Further, I don't see how this would lead to any additional revenue. Universities might be big, but that does not mean that they have unlimited cash. Also, you don't seem to know what an endowment is, it is not money that can be spent but rather money from which one generates interest. A 500 million dollar endowment does not mean that someone just gave you 500 million dollars to spend however you want to.
Second 5. There is no way to enforce land claims in land which you do not actually control. I strongly doubt any Earth nation would really get behind such claims to the extent you would need to to make them enforced. Further, I don't believe that there will be much demand at all for land which it'll cost you many millions of dollars, at the least, to actually use. Rather, these unsubstantiated land claims will probably just cause an organizational problem for Mars in the long term, when people actually start using the land. Further, the colony will have a problem if they accidentally sell off the land of an orebody/other resource that they later realize they intend to use.
Re Second 4 - Do you understand the concept here? This wouldn't be an ordinary branch of the University. It would be a centre for astronomy, physics and planetary science (maybe even astrobiology). It would be a post grad and research centre. Perhaps after a few years it would have an enrolment of 20 post grads and professorial staff engaged in various research projects. UNiversities are always hungry for prestige because that in turn brings in the donations and the brightest students and teaching staff who in turn maintain the university's reputation.
See my previous comments on endowments and the fact that most of the $500 million will pass to the Consortium for construction, life support and transit.
Second 5 - I would agree this is problematical. Ideally one would get the support of the UN and major states on Earth to support a system of long lease purchasing of land. These would be special leases I think, with conditions attached about usage and bringing benefits to the whole of humankind. I would favour giving people 250 year leases on the land - so that people can feel that these could be good long term investments once they see the colonisation process is under way. The land would have a v. low value compared with Earth, but the leases should be tradable and should rise over time as people become more confident that the planet is being settled.
#6693 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Reusable Rockets to Orbit » 2012-01-07 21:11:09
With non-reusability, and a figure of $5000 per kg to LEO I think we are "good to go" for Mars. So I am not too hung up on it, although obviously it's desirable if the economics work out. I've never liked sea recovery. Seems so intrinsically costly and problematic. But if we are being creative...maybe a giant inflatable out at sea would help...so the returning rocket stage lands on the huge inflatable. The inflatable could be towed into position by fast motor boats launched from an ocean going ship...
#6694 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Reusable Rockets to Orbit » 2012-01-07 21:05:15
wrt the paper airplane re-entry, it was my understanding according, I believe, to that "Scientific American" article that the material being used was paper coated in glass nanofibers; Not exactly paper, per se, but still not something that could exactly be described as "not paper." I'm not surprised that it did not survive re-entry, but on the other hand that they thought it might work at all I think says something about the potential that this kind of material has.
Hop:
Needless to say, I don't regard your math as consistently sound. I would need to see a cite and the work behind your calculations.
Were you polite, I would give you a citation and tell you to work the rocket equation out for yourself. Seeing as you've instead taken it as an opportunity to flame me, I don't see why you would expect any response. Whatever impatience I may have had in posts towards you in the past, I do not intend to continue because this is not in accordance with forum rules or simple matters of respect. I will instead treat future flames on your part as rule violations and respond as appropriate.
Well I for one don't want to lose Hop's input. I've been flamed by him - and lived to tell the tale. [ And I'm still awaiting his answer on why with more meteorites we have higher meteorite prices on Earth...] Best to ignore the flaming or respond in kind - banning would diminish the site.
#6695 Re: Human missions » Mars Direct 2007 » 2012-01-07 20:57:09
Louis- Have you done your research on that? According to this page of the Atomic Rocket website, citing a NASA report, 17 m^3 per crewmember is the bare minimum in terms of survival. I believe most Mars missions call for a 6-person crew; This would imply a 100 cubic meter hab. However, you don't want to be at the bare survival minimum. Rather, you want to be at a level of space where the crew will actually be able to function properly and get done all of the science and exploration that is absolutely vital for the first mission. I would say that a 210 m^3 hab is perfectly reasonable for a mission of the length we're contemplating. It's not going to be spacious or roomy by any standard; for comparison, the average prison cell is about 10 m^3, plus the communal spaces (for which I can't seem to find hard numbers). Prisoners do not fare very well in prisons; I don't think we want our Astronauts to live in similar accommodations. That said, does anyone else have input on this one? I'm no expert in personnel management.
Well the Apollo lunar module was just over 6 cubic metres for two people - or 3 cubic metres for one. So in terms of bare survival I don't think your figure can be right.
I am thinking in terms of 6 people as well.
I don't know if you've ever had a garden shed or a tree house. I've had friends from childhood who used to make veritable second homes out of sheds and would stay there happily for hours on end in a space no bigger than 6 cubic metres. You can pack a hell of a lot into a little shed and you can do even more with 100 cubic metres. There will be plenty of room for sleeping, showering, cooking, food prep and eating. You can incorporate a small gymnasium for two. All the science for the first mission can be pretty miniaturised.
My mission conception would include a farm hab - so there will be other pressurised structures in which people can move.
Most prisoners seem to look pretty muscled up and mean...They're hardly wasting away in modern prisons.
I think with 100 cubic metres - with a floor space of 20x20feet - you can do a lot. You can meet all the essential requirements:
Hygiene - 2 toilets/basin and shower (30 sq ft total)
Food prep, storage and cooking. (20 sq. feet)
Bunks - 6 (20 sq ft total)
A small dining and meeting area with video screen (40 sq. ft)
A small gym and games area. (40 sq. ft)
Life support, energy storage and monitoring equipment. (40 sq. ft)
There could be rotas to allow people some additional privacy in using the dining space or games area. E.g. on a rota people might be able to watch a movie by themselves. Such private "downtime" might be helpful, although I am not sure it is absolutely crucial. People can get alot of privacy in their bunk space.
We might experiment with virtual reality headsets as well if they were helpful in confined situations but people will have a lot of personal space with individual Laptops and headphones/sound systems.
#6696 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Mars Economic Activity » 2012-01-07 17:21:20
3. I don't know of any known concentrations of Gold. For a mission, it's silly to try to make a profit in this way given the cost of sending over transportation. It's a bit optimistic IMO to expect the gold to be near enough a place where it makes sense to place a colony (e.g., near water and Iron and silica and perhaps a few other things needed for production of things that the colony needs, which IMO are more important than finding gold to export to Earth. Obviously a colony needs to have a launch infrastructure to launch the gold back to Earth if it wants to make a profit from it, but that will be fairly necessary for a lot of profit-making strategies, as well as interaction with Earth. Assuming you can get a rocket engine working, a pressure-fed methlox rocket from Mars Surface to phobos isn't totally unthinkable. On the other hand in the context of an early colony it's probably beyond the manufacturing capability there. I think exporting physical materials is something that's going to have to wait a few years. Also, the first rockets will almost certainly be solid fueled because that does not necessitate a complex engine (think of how far back solid rockets go; a medieval chinese firework won't get to Mars orbit anymore than it'll get to LEO but it's a much simpler technology).
I doubt the survey equipment we have now can find concentrations of gold. But if there are surface concentrations then we will come across them. My perspective was over several years. Maybe we will be lucky and within the first decade we will come across some nice rich veins of gold in an area of vulcanism.
There is no doubt we will be bringing material back. The only questions are how much and how to do it - and will it be an additional cost or a source of surplus revenue. Gold ticks a lot of the right boxes for me.
4. I would like a citation for your number on olympic sponsorship. I googled and could not corroborate the number of a billion dollars. $500 million won't cover any significant proportion of the cost of the initial mission. Remember, NASA isn't in it for a profit and if you want to write off development you have to be talking about NASA. I don't know what role sponsorship has for the colony but it might be possible to generate some revenue based on using the Mars Colony as a brand.
Beijing raised $886 million. That's just from the main sponsors - doesn't cover sponsorship of individual athletes and teams.
The target for 2012 is $1 billion.
http://www.sponsorship.com/About-IEG/IE … -Alte.aspx
5. Unrealistic and a bit silly. No person or institution has that kind of money just lying around. I challenge you to find even one example of anything even remotely similar in magnitude..
Warren Buffett disposes of $1.6 billion in a single charitable donation in one year and does the same more or less every year.
#6697 Re: Human missions » Mars Direct 2007 » 2012-01-07 15:07:56
The Mars Semi Direct mission has some pretty good elements I think.
However I would certainly query the size of the Hab. 210 cubic metres volume is a lot of volume I think. 6x6x6metres near enough. Enough for two rooms of 20 by 20 foot or eight rooms of 10 by 10 foot. People can live much more closely together than that and still have privacy. Hygiene and kitchen facilities can be minimised.
That seems pretty excessive to me. There could be a huge mass saving there - by half perhaps.
Also, is it efficient to take to the surface something with all that landing gear. Wouldn't it be better to pre-land an inflatable hab by robot craft?
For me the investment priority should be accurate robot landings, so we can be confident of getting equipment into say a 5x5km zone (using ground transponders and satellite tracking).
#6698 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Mars Economic Activity » 2012-01-07 14:23:18
JoshNH4H wrote:Providing evidence for claims is a vital part of academic argument.
Very true. However in this regard you're in no position to criticize Louis.
Hop - Why don't you give your explanation for why the price of meteorites on earth has risen as supply has also risen -rather than sniping.
#6699 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Mars Economic Activity » 2012-01-07 14:20:34
I don't expect you to be, as you say, "my citation slave." Providing evidence for claims is a vital part of academic argument. I will have you know that I tried to be quite thorough in evaluating your argument; I only asked for a citation when I could not find anything in support of your statements. I am aware that you have priorities other than going back to redo research you've already done. That's why, if you want to make a credible argument, you put them in there the first time!
With respect to endowments: An endowment is not spending money for a university. Actually, it is quite the opposite; it is a savings account, so to speak, from which the university will only withdraw interest. If a university has an endowment of 1 billion dollars, and obtains an average of 3% per year on its investments, that 1 billion dollar endowment translates into 30 million dollars per year of cash, most of which will probably go towards running or improving the university. I don't see what bearing this has on my statement of the potential value of Martian regolith. What does the value of the endowments of Harvard and Yale have to do with the per-kilo price of martian regolith brought back to Earth?
With respect to meteorites- I actually addressed that exact point! Please re-read my response to your point 1 a bit more carefully, as I directly address that factoid (In fact, our two sources give such similar numbers that I suspect they are both looking at the same primary source to get them!). I explain why I believe that $1,000/g will not be representative of the market when you are bringing back samples from the red planet. I do not believe that I know better than geology.com (though I would hardly call that an academic source). I accept that geology.com is providing a fairly accurate number for the value it is actually giving. I do not accept that this value will be the same when the market has been completely transformed. For why it will be completely transformed, see my response to your number 1.
With respect to watches: Rolex may make a million watches, but the vast majority of these do not sell for $100,000 or more. This was, if you recall, the price range which you suggested for these 5,000 watches in your point 9. The source which I offered in my response would seem to indicate a significantly smaller production of watches costing tens of thousands of dollars or more. 5,000 watches would be a significant share of this market.
Re meteorites I don't think you've addressed the point I made to Hop:
Why if increasing supply leads to reduced price haven't we seen that on Earth? On Earth professional meteorite collection methods only really got started towards the end of the century. Supply has increased dramatically but everything I read suggests prices have been rising and rising. Why is that - and why doesn't that apply to Mars material.
You should look at it the right way round. Who will be in the market to buy this stuff? I say out of the perhaps 10,000 universities on Earth maybe half will be in the market (let's leave private collectors out). Those are the ones with geology departments with mineral collections or astronomy departments. (This is an educated guess based on my experience in the UK) Even if they only average $20,000 each that's $100 million. However, as indicated I believe there is good reason to think that the big players: Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Paris etc will be prepared to stump up much larger amounts. They can probably do so from their existing resources but these unis do attract large donations:-
http://harvardmagazine.com/breaking-news/a-giants-gift
The link you gave re watches shows that companies like Piaget with an average selling price of $25,000 sell about 20,000 per annum. That's just one company. There are lots of references in the article to watches costing over $100,000. The global watch market is worth $29 billion. There is clearly a great marketing opprotunity for men's watches because Mars is associated with male warrior virtues which lots of rich successful men like to think of themselves as being. I see no reason why Mars Rolex couldn't generate $500 million in sales per annum - whether all of it would come to the
Consortium is debatable. But maybe half would. On the other hand, if Musk is right and costs of transit are much lower then sales could be much greater and Mars could tap into the medium-priced luxury watch market.
I don't think 5,000 watches is unreasonable when one luxury watch company alone sells 20,000 a year. And I don't think the $100,000 price tag is unreasonable. The watch could incorporate some Mars mineral - just think of what a talking point that makes the watch.
I really think you are talking this down for no good reason.
You're wrong about endowment. Please see the following definition:
1. (Economics, Accounting & Finance / Banking & Finance)
a. the source of income with which an institution, etc., is endowed
b. the income itself
(free dictionary)
Endowments can be used in various ways. An obvious one is the establishment of a new university or college. That happens on Earth very often.
There is no reason why special endowments wouldn't be sought to establish Mars Geology Centres within established universities on Earth. My point about the $100billion plus universities endowments on the planet was also that the interest/earnings on that - somewhere between $5 and $10 billion per annum (up to $100 billion per decade) provide quite a pot for Mars-related purchasers. Can't you imagine the competition there will be set up these Mars Geology Centres? I think you'd find a lot of universities will reduce their spending on earth based geological expeditions and put money into Mars.
Remember also how economics works. If I give $500 million to establish a university, the university doesn't appear out of thin air. What might be capital expenditure for me is someone else's revenue. In the case of establishing the University of Mars, the money will be revenue for the Consortium who will get paid for construction, transfer of materials, transport of people, and life support.
#6700 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Mars Economic Activity » 2012-01-06 18:26:12
Louis-
I know I said I would reply to this topic, and it's been a while since I said that. Nevertheless, here is my reply. Before I respond to particular points of your post, general point to keep in mind: I think that the first few science missions will be concentrated a lot more on exploration and prospecting than generating money. I don't necessarily rule out that kind of thing to try to defray costs, but I believe that because the science and the prospecting associated with the first few missions is really important for the future development of the colonies, if something to generate revenue for the colonies cuts into science and exploration time, it's not worth it. Further, I'm in general going to be saying that your numbers are on the optimistic side. I am also of the opinion that initial missions should worry a lot more about doing science than selling themselves out to corporations, especially when doing so IMO will not generate sufficient revenue to significantly impact mission cost. For a colony, of course some amount of time will have to be spent in looking for things which will generate income in terran dollars for the colony, and it's a simple matter of which ones to choose. Are you familiar with my exchange rate vs. profitability argument for a colony? It would appear to be very relevant to this discussion.
Please keep in mind that I am putting a lot of time in this post. I am liable to be offended if you reject a point without citations and without specifically addressing the sub-points I made in support of my counter-claims..
I've already put a lot of time into replying - lost a long post. Please bear in mind I have a job, a family and many other interests. So I am not going to be your citation slave.
Your point about exploration being the priority is poorly made. Exploring and prospecting means collecting material. What are you going to do with it - throw it back on the Mars surface like throwing a fish back in the water after catching it? Or are you going to bring some of it at least back to Earth . And then what are you going to do? Give it away free? Why? - if you need billions of dollars to keep up the colonisation effort? The sensible thing to do is to sell it. And that is from mission one onwards.
I may answer your post in stages to prevent another lost post situation.
1. I think that your figure of $100,000/kg is at the very best completely baseless. [Even so, you're talking about bringing back 2-4 tonnes of stuff per year. How exactly do you propose to do this? That's a lot for one mission, especially when you're only actually talking about a mission every 26 months. So you want to bring back 4-8 tonnes of regolith per mission? Sounds like that will really push your mass budget.] Further, it really undermines your argument when you make outrageous claims (regardless of what you think of your claim, I have yet to see anyone agree with you, which is a hint that you're going to want to provide some evidence if you want to legitimize it). This website says that lunar and martian meteorites currently go for $1,000/gram. This does not support your statement. To put it another way, the tiny, tiny fraction of all meteorites (themselves a pretty limited bunch) which make it to Earth from Mars went for $1,000,000 per kilogram. I can't imagine there were more than a few kilograms out there. There are 103 Martian Meteorites known. The total mass of all of theses meteorites is 101.8 kg. This gives a total theoretical market value of 101.8 million dollars. But that's not the real value. Only a small proportion of these are sold in any given year. I think 10% would be putting it very much on the high side. You're talking about, in one single mission, bringing back at least 40 times as much mass of Mars stuff as is known to exist on the planet Earth, with a promise of more every two years. Now, this market is definitely not tapped out. But seeing as the amount of Martian meteorites which are actually available for sale (keeping in mind that the vast majority of Martian meteorites known are probably sitting in university labs) would increase by a factor of a thousand times or more, and the rate of increase by a million times or more (interestingly, the rate at which martian meteorites seem to have been found seems to have peaked in the early 2000s), to posit a fall in price of merely 10 times is simply ludicrous. I think we are looking at more like $25,000/kg, at best. This is still a hell of a lot of money for a terrestrial commodity, right up there with a confirmed scientific meteorite which people saw falling to Earth. Remember, it's not just a matter of existing supply but also of promised supply. If you plan to bring back 4-8 tonnes every year forever, the rarity value is going to plummet...
See my replies to Mark and Hop above. Also - Harvard and Yale have a combined endowment of $55billion. Extrapolate that across the globe - there must be $100s of billions of endowments on Planet Earth. The idea that a few billions of those over ten years couldn't be made available for Mars-related purchases seems naive to me. I keep thinking you are like one of those Native Americans ready to sell Manhattan Island for a handful of beads.
2. Simply ridiculous, for many of the same reasons as above. As you will see on the same website I gave for the price of lunar and martian meteorites, the most pricey of meteorites from unknown sources (such as an asteroid, or whatever, the kind of thing you would find on the Moon), are worth up to $25,000. That's the ones that people saw falling from the sky and then collected and they were found to be of a rare type. Having been on Mars would increase the value somewhat compared to Earth, but it's important to keep in mind that nobody has seen meteorites falling from the sky on Mars. Given the added novelty value of it being a meteorite vs. just regolith, I would project a value of about $30,000/kg, also at best, slightly more than simply regolith (remember, Martian rocks or regolith have already been in space; being in different space doesn't really up the value all that much. Something else to keep in mind, because Mars' atmosphere is so much thinner than Earth's, meteorites won't have that same charred look as Earth ones do.
No charring? So we can forget the heatshields for Mars? Ha-ha.
Take a look at this:
http://geology.com/meteorites/value-of-meteorites.shtml
"At the high end of the pricing scale are unusual types such as the diogenite Tatahouine (fell June 27, 1931, Foum Tatahouine, Tunisia). A prime specimen will easily fetch $50/gram while rare examples of lunar and Martian meteorites may sell for $1,000/gram or more — almost forty times the current price of gold! "
You're saying you know better than geology.com?