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No, so far it has been confirmed by five independent groups, which is the only reason I'm giving it any credence at all...
Why would the particle disappear? They normally annihilate each other because they come into existence as a matter / anti-matter pair. Obviously under normal circumstances it's only a very short matter of time before one bumps into the other.
I am a physicist, but I haven't read the papers yet... It sounds from the popular descriptions like one of these particles is being accelerated via interaction with the microwave before it has a chance to run into its reversed matter pairing. This is a bit like Hawking radiation bleeding energy from a black hole via the momentum of these virtual particles. Qualitatively, I see no reason why this couldn't work with conservation of energy and momentum... unless you are forgetting to include the virtual particles in your momentum calculations.
EDIT: By the way, does anyone have links to the original articles?
That's why you don't have eight cables, you have one cable with eight threads.
I wonder how reliable those battery weight estimates are 20 years later...
Well I might as well chime in that my Android phone does the same thing, but I haven't the time to properly diagnose it. I can hit "post reply" get the login form, login and redirect to the submit form, and post - but then I'm logged out and the site turns red again. I have not experienced that on any of my other machines, but it always happens on my phone.
Terraformer, I think we are in more ideological agreement than you might think, however I have more faith in humanity's capability to want/“need” more and more as resources become less and less scarce. #firstworldproblems. Take the 20th century: we've seen much of the populous of the western world move out of poverty / serfdom (sometimes literal serfdom!), and into the middle class. And yet we've seen working hours and reported stress levels increase in the same groups, as the Jones' have so much more for them to keep up with. And for the most part this will become the new norm ... except for us crotchety old guys sitting in chairs on the porch talking about how when we grew us we didn't have the Internet, and you actually had to buy stuff in stores instead of 3D print it, and then yell at the kids to get off our lawn.
Of course advanced A.I. or transhumanist technology could through a huge wrench into that picture. Take any theory of the future which a huge grain of salt.
Vincent, the raw photographs are available in the Planetary Data System. However cameras do not work the way that I think you believe they do. No camera does a good job of approximating what human eyes would see, and calibrations are always required. The situation is made 'worse' by the types of instruments which fly on these missions, which for very good reasons do not use the same visible light wavelength ranges that human eyes are receptive to.
Certainly we have more and better maps than explorers of previous generations. But that's a far, far knowing enough to guarantee everything to go right the first time. In fact there is a lot that we don't know, and much of that is not reflected in the data. You can go read in a textbook the composition of Mars. Almost all of that is extrapolated from limited evidence, and competing theories are not shown. In fact there is a lot that we could be wrong about.
Even if we've guessed the mineral ratios correctly, that doesn't mean that we have a firm grasp on the actual structure of Martian rocks. We can simulate (and that's where your textbook answers come from), but that's just compounding the guesswork assumptions that go into the simulation. Trace elements or impurities can significant effects on the mechanical properties of minerals. Maybe on the first mission we'll confirm that there is indeed water just a few meters down, but all of our drill bits break when we try to extract it due to the unexpected hardness (pesky perchlorates).
You will need return mass for any economic justification of a martian colony, so IMHO it makes sense to develop that technology now and do a couple of short (conjunction class) small-crew missions to provide ground truth, validate engineering models, and develop procedures. You could do a one-way Mars One type of mission from the get-go, but you better be only depending on Martian air and regolith dust for ISRU.
I don't think there is one, although it is true that X-33/VentureStar would not have resulted in an operational SSTO, which was the hoped-for end goal of the program. Rather it was a rocket-powered intercontinental aircraft (Mach-12 cruise above the atmosphere, ~1.5hrs to anywhere on Earth). IIRC one and only thing which really killed it was the failure in creating a composite LH2 tank.
More interesting, I think, is that the X-33 could have been the basis of a Martian SSTO, and probably *would* have worked have worked on Earth or Venus with air-breathing NTR. More likely, an external tank could have enabled orbital velocity, similar to shuttle but without the SRBs.
Rockets aren't my thing though, so I should probably shut up and let Bob Clark or GW take over. My interest in X-33/VentureStar was that it cut out most of the operational costs of shuttle.
If you have system of rationing points which are unregulated so that people can trade them, then you effectively have a currency by another name (backed by physical goods: the rationed consumables). Of course if you actually rationed to individuals directly instead of issuing points, or if the points were somehow protected from transfer (can only be redeemed by the colonist named), then that'd be a different story.
If I were designing an initial colony mission, I would definitely empower them with a self-issued currency. Initially it would be distributed in at least two ways: basic income (an equal amount to all colonists regardless of means), and merit based / competitively selected subsidized business loans & contracts to jumpstart local industry. The basic income should start out as some multiple of the number of units necessary to cover cost of living, initially from the rationed colony stores, but later baskets of home-grown goods on the free market. It then declines over a short couple of years until eventually people have to work to get by, and then eventually reaches zero.
At first the only property will be the dwellings, possessions, and consumables brought from Earth. Rent or consumption of these stores will effectively be returning the money back to the colony (destroying it), but more income will be received than could reasonably be spent through cost of living, and the excess will be saved or invested on an individual basis. The loans & supply contracts provide the seed and direction for starting an in-situ industry. As healthy industries are setup, the machinery brought from Earth is privatized and colony spending (by means of printing money) is wound down. In the long run, the economic goal would be to set demurrage rates to achieve zero interest, and to set spending rates (printing money) equal to that required of GDP & population growth. The percent of the economy due to this "government" spending would be less and less over time, but sufficient to provide a minimal safety net and communal services.
EDIT: I should mention that I don't think this has been adequately studied. What's the ideal monetary structure for a Mars colony? I think this is still an open question and deserves looking into.
Title says it all:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=41131
Can we have our X-33/VentureStar back, please?
Well fundamentally economic systems are the processes we choose for making decisions about scarce resources. I don't think that Martian colonies will be venturing into the realm of post-scarcity any time soon. As for capitalist vs. socialist / free-market vs. central planning, that's venturing into ideological debate that may be on-topic for this subforum, but probably not this thread.
But if there are capitalistic / free-market elements to colonial life, having control over one's currency is a powerful political and economic tool, as many European states are just now finding out. Using the U.S. dollar on Mars may be analgous in significant ways to using the german / french euro in Greece and Spain.
In the near-term I am working on an extension to Bitcoin which could be used to issue land-use contracts or commodity tokens, and then trade these for each other or currency using the distributed, decentralized, pseudo-anonymous bitcoin network. The only central authority would be the initial issuance (the process of registering a mining claim, or delivering product to market), but from that point on the tokens representing ownership could be transferred or manipulated peer-to-peer.
As for longer-term implications, such a system would definitely promote free-market approaches. With bitcoin-like infrastructure, the difficulty becomes not how to create these markets, but how to slow down such developments so that there's time to get things properly registered with terran regulatory authorities. Bitcoin-like systems make it very easy to launch a digital IPO, or operate an exchange.
I think the closest analogy would be the Vancouver stock exchange, which has been a source of capital for early-stage prospecting and small-cap mining companies for decades. I would say that the Vancouver exchange has been critical to the mineral boom that Canada is experiencing, but it's also been home to shams, swindles, market manipulations, and penny-stock charlatans. That's part of why I think the requirements for making a land claim should be quite onerous, with a lot of data and convincing arguments for its composition, and all that information should be made public when the land-use contract is issued. That way people know exactly what they are investing in and can check the figures themselves. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I also like the idea of setting up a not-for-profit Space Investment Bank/Chamber of Commerce to lobby governments and invest where possible, as well as to manage the dollar assets of the company. (I like the idea of space-based currency from the get-go).
For many ventures, especially one-way permanent settlement missions I see an in-situ currency as a necessity. Colonial economics will be mostly isolated and divorced from the home economies on Earth, and it does not make sense for swings in the interconnected global economy to influence pricing and availability of credit on an isolated Mars colony, for example.
New digital currencies like Bitcoin and Open-Transactions give us the tools to do better. A new Martian settlement can launch it's own currency, giving an equal number of currency units to every settler every month for the initial distribution period, as well as equal provisions from the ship's stores. Both the absolute and relative value of the currency would decline over time, and people would naturally fall into capitalistic roles of producer, merchant, consumer as the ship's stores are depleted and local commercial agriculture and industry takes over. If demurrage is used, the new coinage minted to offset demurrage could be used for basic services, providing a minimal safety net.
These digital technologies also provide or enable market tools, allowing currencies to float against each other. So two different settlements on Mars could each have their own currency with a fixed monetary base, and the relative value of each determined by the free market, but obviously correlated with their economic success.
I find the UN entirely irrelevant to this discussion, and the OST makes state-sanctioning unnecessary. But I'd rather debate that in a different thread.
Any comments on the use of free markets to make business plans fit within investment horizons?
My goal was only to throw up a “citation needed” where I felt it was appropriate. I think the case can be made that resource could be extracted more cheaply in space well into the foreseeable future, as in some particular cases there are ores sitting on the surface of the Moon, NEOs or Mars which are more pure than all but the richest deposits on Earth. I remain less convinced that space manufacturing can be made competitive with Earth industry, or that transportation costs can be comparable without a space elevator. Some exceptions do exist though, such as novel zero-g techniques in materials science and biology.
I think you're on the right path though, and asking the right questions. It'll be economics that ultimately takes us to Mars and beyond, not social or political ideals.
OST and later treaties make clear that nation states have both sovereignty over and responsibility for their citizens, spacecraft, and (untested, but by logical extension) derivatives such as in-situ constructed habitats. Martians choosing to form a self-governing community would be a secessionary act. Not saying it won't happen, but it's not true to say “they have the right to set up as their own sovereign body.” A moral right maybe, but not a legal or political right under current law.
Unless, of course, the nation-state they belong to has a process for independence. It'd be interesting to see if any of the proposed flag-of-convenience countries have or could enact such provisions.
If you'll forgive me for simplifying, your argument basically boils down to this: the level of automation technology required to make space industry even practical will also make it more efficient (and therefore profitable) than Earth industry in the present time. This is true, but it's also a meaningless statement. Advanced automation will be applied to terrestrial factories just as well.
I have a colleague at NASA-Ames who dreams of using proposed space automation to build a giant sand crawler in the Sahara desert, which scoops up sand, bedrock, and atmosphere to make solar panels / solar thermal stations, as well as pipelines, rail tracks, and both energy and data transmission cables. It'd make a slow crawl of a kilometer or so per day, leaving a paved road and trail of interconnected industrial capital in its wake.
How would that not be more efficient than doing the same thing on the Moon and having to ship the results back?
Secondly, I really think you underestimate the challenges (not benefits) of manufacturing in zero gravity. Take just your machining example: where do all the metal waste chips go? In the presence of gravity it's really simple: just use a machining fluid to both keep the part cool and absorb the momentum of the smaller chips. Let gravity pull the fluid & chips away from the work unit and through a filter on the base. If anything becomes stuck, give the unit a vibration and watch the dislodged pieces fall to the ground. Collect the chips from the filter for recycling, and pump the fluid back up to reuse it.
But in zero gravity.. chips fly everywhere and get in everything. Space becomes filled with junk clogging up moving parts from every direction. You could use suction to take the fluid and chips away, but whoops that's right - you're in a hard vacuum. And let's not even get into the problem of finding a machining fluid that doesn't boil under low pressure.
Engineering for either microgravity or hard vacuum is hard, very hard. There are a few unique cases where the properties of microgravity and hard vacuum provide unique capabilities. Crystal growth comes to mind, for example. For the most part though, the nature and extent of unique applications of in-space manufacturing is an open question and deserves more study.
A more rigorous answer is that for any given product, there is not necessarily a reason why building it in space is more productive than building it on Earth. But if we can get the transportation costs down and get a really strong infrastructure going up there, one would expect that the actual costs of doing so would be low.
If you want to make an economic argument, low is not good enough. You need lower.
Sorry, I misread you, but having now read you correctly I am not impressed!
Where is this Land Claim Registry going to be based? USA or China or Russia or some tiny Pacific island state? All agency activity has to be under the aegis of a state according to the Treaty.
Unless it were agreed upon by all states (in effect as part of a new treaty) you are setting up a conflict. China and Russia would never accept the authority of such a Registry. And there is no provision in the Treaty for such a body.
Louis, the Land Claim Registry wouldn't have space operations, so where it is based doesn't have OST implications. Regardless of where it is based (my vote would be for an internationally neutral location like Switzerland), it would probably have to have subsidiaries within the jurisdiction of every space power so that it has standing to bring civil cases to court. But again, there is no conflict as you claim. These would be civil suits of contractual law - no recognition national land grants would be required.
Maybe an analogy makes the point better. Pretend that the supreme court decided that it is unconstitutional for the national park service require reservations for camping sites in national parks. So the policy becomes first-come, first-serve but with limited lots available, so you have no guarantee that you'll have a spot of your own until you arrive at the campsite. You and I don't like that we can plan a nature vacation a year in advance, but end up in a hotel because the campsite was full when we got there. So we create the Campsite Reservation Registry, a not-for-profit organization, and each sign a contract saying that we will each be held liable for $X/day of damages plus the travel costs of the wronged party if we exercise our constitutional right to stay at an already reserved campsite by arriving first and not leaving when asked.
Now what happens if I do exactly that? Nothing at first, because the park service doesn't intervene. But while I'm enjoying my vacation you're in a hotel calling your lawyer to file civil charges against me in small claims court, and sure enough: when we have our day in court and the contract is produced, I'm held liable for $X/day plus your hotel, airfare, and car rental cost. And once a contract judge makes that ruling, the state will enforce it, even though the original activity wasn't illegal. That's the nature of contract law!
Now the traditional problem with this setup is that it only covers me and you. What if we show up and someone else is in our camping spot? Tough luck, they didn't sign a contract. HOWEVER, that's where the unique twist of a viral clause comes in. Let's say we had that viral clause and got every gas station within 300 miles to also sign the contract. Then the owners of that gas station would be held liable for any individual which fuels up there and then goes and takes someone else's reserved camping spot ($X/day plus travel costs). Now obviously this will make the gas station's lawyers and liability insurance people cringe, so what they do is they print the Campsite Reservation Registry's contract on the outside of the fueling station, and anyone who fills up has to first consent to the contract (by hitting “Yes” on a screen). Now at least anyone who drives into the park is almost certainly signatory to the Campsite Reservation Registry's contract, and therefore liable for damages if they refuse to honor someone else's reservation.
The analogous organizations for space would be launch and fuel depot service operators. All you have to do is convince these people that it's in their best interest to have a viable land claim registry, and therefore be signatory to the contract. It's not a hard argument to make, because more certainty in property rights means more business, and more business means more money for infrastructure service operators.
I believe my approach is much more practical. In reality, just as in the Antarctic, states (or private companies) won't try and build on each other's bases. That being the case, there could be little objection to a system of land licensing which would in effect amount to long leasing. Such licensing would have de facto and possibly de jure recognition from other states.
Comparisons to Antarctica are quite a bit more stretched for a variety of reasons, not least of which that economic exploitation of Antarctic resources is prohibited by international law, which makes the dynamics quite a bit different. There is also an extensive systems of antarctic land claims which still have legal force, even under the treaty system:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … ca.CIA.svg
The Antarctic treaty simply says no new claims shall be made while the treaty is in effect, and it's worth noting that the U.S. did not ratify this clause. Regardless, to my knowledge there is no land licensing regime for Antarctica, so I really don't see any parallel at all.
Josh, it's correct that the OST and legal precedent from Apollo (1) makes any vessels undisputedly operate under the legal regime of its host country, and (2) in-situ resources stop being un-ownable celestial objects and follow the property laws of the host nation as soon as “acquired”. (Despite having killed followup to the Apollo programme, Nixon will probably go down in history books as doing more for the future of space than any other president except perhaps JFK, as the varied stories of his “Goodwill moon rocks” gifted to 135 foreign heads of state then stolen, traded, or sold at auction sets up precedent in international law for ownership of extracted extraterrestrial resources.)
However I contend that a regime where use rights are not determined until the resource is extracted out of the ground (1) provides too much risk to business operators, (2) creates a culture of secrecy that hinders industry collaboration and advancement, and (3) makes impossible various financial arrangements which would otherwise provide liquidity and thereby enable greater investment in space.
Regarding the two points, consider these cases. What if I perform a robotic assay of Shackleton crater on the lunar south pole determining where the best resource concentrations are; my competitor then launches in secret and builds an extraction setup right on top of the richest deposits while we're still prepping our equipment for launch. Or, a seasonal mining operation on an Earth-crossing asteroid or short-period comet only operates during perihelion due to launch windows with Earth. After one successful season we return on the next pass only to discover in-transit that our competitors launch a day later but on a faster trajectory and get there first. Do we then turn around and go home, empty-handed?
The “use it or lose it” regime you propose would fit within the OST, yes, but would be chaos and anarchy. The problem with anarchy is that it pushes your investments up front as you rush to extract, store and thereby establish claim over ores far ahead of when they are actually needed. You do this to mitigate risk, but at a greatly increased upfront cost of operations, thereby requiring even greater seed investments. What I propose, on the other hand, mitigates risk and decreases operational costs.
The other problem is that it promotes a culture of secrecy. If any other mining company can come in and take its claim (as it have no claim), then any rational organization would treat its mineral assays (both positive and negative) as extremely confidential information. This results in exorbitant waste as many different companies perform the exact same assays in the exact same places to get the exact same information, as well as scientific loss as the knowledge gained from assays and what's learned from interpreting them (including best practices for performing assays) becomes a trade secret. Everyone loses in such a scenario. If on the other hand a system of property rights protects mining claims, then mining companies gain from sharing results for a wide variety of reasons.
Regarding point (3), for investment in space to be competitive with other industries, we need a way to break up the timeline with discrete liquidity events. This is a direct analogue to how things work on Earth, where land-use rights are established by prospectors who do the hard work of determining ore deposits and quality, and then cash out by selling those rights to mining companies or the open market (see the Vancouver exchange for how this works in North America, typically by creating a company which owns the rights and listing shares of that venture on an exchange).
In the business world, everything operates on 4 to 8 year timelines - simple uncertainty over the future makes it unlikely that anyone would invest anything in a venture too far outside of that time range. If we want a vibrant investment climate, then we need to shorten timelines for expected return, and mitigate risk that would otherwise drive up costs.
Now about your last comment on land speculation, I hope that you would agree that interim liquidity based on the real perceived future value does add value, as it makes it easier for a host of reasons to acquire seed capital. I assume therefore you were talking about speculative bubbles where valuation becomes divorced from any reasonable analysis, in which case I agree. This will be getting a little bit into the weeds, but there is a solution:
The 19th century and early 20th century land reformers Henry George (U.S.) and Silvio Gesell (Austria) were both economists who independently advocated for land reform in the form of a universal, flat tax on the undeveloped value of land. Both their theories and later experiments show that such a tax greatly dampens speculation-driven cycles, while barely having an effect on the economy itself. In other words, as you increase the annual tax on a parcel of land, starting from zero up to a certain level that tax's only significant effect is to prevent speculative pressures from taking hold. After that threshold it begins to have a measurable and quickly significant negative effect on the land's usage, and thereby the larger economy. Both the economic theory and experiment show that this cutoff, the ideal tax rate is a historically constant fraction of the undeveloped value of the land.
Taking this back to my proposal, I would recommend that holders of land-use claims be subject to a continuously assessed upkeep fee at a rate equal to that historically determined percentage of the undeveloped value of the land (the value of the land itself would be periodically determined by a fair mechanism such as auction, although that's as far as I've gotten with the details). This is why, as I mentioned earlier, the registry is likely to assess larger fees than it is likely to require for administrative purposes. If organized as a not-for-profit, those fees could be treated as a communal resource and used for services everybody needs, such as a space coast guard, public works (space elevator), humanitarian aid, or R&D. But again, we're getting pretty far afield here.
My proposal doesn't involve any states granting title whatsoever. In fact, such a granting of title would be an explicit national appropriation, prohibited by the OST. The treaty says nothing about exclusive use rights, except by the implicit inference that the typical method of land grants by claim of sovereignty would be prohibited. Hence my proposal which provides a stateless model for property rights enforced by civil contract.
If you are given a title to land by the non-governmental, not-for-profit Land Claim Registry, what actually happened is that everyone else in the whole solar system has or will enter into a contract saying that they will be liable for restitution if they don't respect your property rights, authorizing the non-governmental, not-for-profit Space Coast Guard (or its contractors) to evict them if it can be demonstrated that they're squatting, etc. The OST and later international agreement do make clear what legal jurisdictions activities in space fall into, thereby giving weight to those contracts.
I do admit that I'm leaving TBD the requirements for land claim registration, size of land grants (you can't claim all of Mars by being the first to land there), as well as annual licensing / upkeep fees. The fees would be necessary to prevent people from just claiming up all the land then not making any productive use of it. There is good reason to believe that the size of the fees would be larger than what it costs to maintain the registry, which then gets us into the whole issue of how that fee income should be spent, such as services provided... But that's a whole other can of worms.
As the title says, I firmly believe that private ownership of land-use rights and extracted resources can be justified under the Outer Space Treaty, and this can be used to bootstrap a vibrant, and permanent in-situ space economy.
I am starting from the assumption that space settlement will ultimately occur as a result of profitable commercial enterprise, and that government involvement will be minimal - either through expensive initial contracts, or as a customer of last resort. Therefore it will be economics, not politics or science which takes us to the Moon, Mars, the outer solar system, and ultimately the stars. I will take this as a given for a wide variety of reasons I won't go into here; if you want to debate this assumption, please create another thread.
Now I'm not going to talk mission architectures, or even specific business plans, but rather the meta issues on top of that. In a capitalist society, if something is not being done it is because it is either illegal or unprofitable (or both). Despite excitement, commercial (orbital) human space programs are few and far between. So what legal and/or economic risks are holding back investment in space, and what can be done to eliminate or reduce these risks, thereby making space investments profitable?
But first: how good does a business plan have to be, in order to get funded?
Venture capital: a look at Silicon Valley
Early venture capital expects the equivalent of an annual return of between 25% to 70% (the spread due to a wide variety of factors), and a liquidity event allowing them to cash out within 4 to 8 years. Citations:
http://bschool.pepperdine.edu/appliedre … eports.htm
http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/ … estors.pdf
So if you're asking for $10 million in early-stage financing today, you'd better be promising from $25 million in 4 years on the low end to $700 million in 8 years on the very high end. The high range may seem absurd, but that is the same ballpark as what an early investment in Google or Facebook or Twitter would have provided, and rare as those deals are, future internet giants are what every investor is looking for and what a space deal would be competing against.
There are two important points to draw from these numbers: (1) the high range is unachievable by any reasonable space business plan, and (2) the timeframe is shorter than the decade or longer it would take to setup any robust humans-to-space programme.
Regarding the first point, a return of “merely” 25% is reasonable if risks can be reduced or eliminated. An internet company carries with it the risk of having very little, if any capital (even the source code is typically very product-centered and worthless), and therefore when it goes belly-up the investor loses everything. In space this isn't necessarily the case: real hardware is placed into orbit and IP (data) is acquired throughout the mission, and these could be liquidated on bankruptcy. The expected return would go up without limit as you add risk to the business plan, but it is probably the case that a well thought out plan with adequate safety margins could be funded with a 25% to 35% expected return.
The second point is the main focus of the remainder of this post. Aside from a few unique industries like tourism, revenues in space projects lag behind investments by decades or more. A mining operation on the Moon or a NEO (robotic or human-tended) could take a decade to get launched, and another half-decade or more for first delivery. And unless you're finding nearly-pure samples of platinum group metals on the surface, a return to Earth of extracted ores probably won't be profitable. So really you'd have to wait until someone else comes up with a use for it in-situ before your company can earn revenue and your investors take a profit.
This, in my mind, is the core issue that has held up private expansion into space in the decades since Apollo. But before addressing it head-on, let's take a small detour into property rights & the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Land claims & mining rights
Conventional wisdom is that the Outer Space Treaty's prohibition of sovereignty claims makes private ownership of extraterrestrial “land” impossible. Conventional wisdom is wrong.
The conventional argument goes as follows: everywhere on Earth, land ownership is at the behest of the state. The state exerts a sovereign claim over territory, and then allows its citizens to buy and exchange title to that land, and uses its sovereign powers (police, military) to protect that title. (While not technically true of common-law countries where under certain circumstances an individual or non-government group can have ultimate ownership, taxation, eminent domain, police power, and escheatment, makes it pretty much work the same.)
The problem with this argument is that sovereignty is not an inherent aspect of land ownership. Rather, it is merely the mechanism for selecting legal jurisdiction for resolving conflicting claims of ownership, and for enforcing the resulting decisions. The essential feature of any land ownership regime is that claimants given title are allowed a (sometimes limited) monopoly over how, by whom, and for what purpose that land may be used for the duration of the title, and a legal process exists whereby conflicts may be arbitrated or litigated. Sovereignty is one solution; as an alternative, I propose voluntary contracts with viral repercussions for breach-of-contract.
This is best explained by example. Say I have done what is necessary to establish a land claim on 433 Eros. I register this claim with a private authority (the Land Claim Registry) and receive a contract of title. This contract says that I am free to use 433 Eros in whatever way I see fit, subject to certain restrictions (which mostly apply to everyone, but in this case might also include preservation for historical and scientific purposes the area around NEAR Shoemaker, which is still property of the U.S. government).
I then do pretty much whatever I want, within the limits of the land-use contract. If there is a dispute (e.g, I go to 433 Eros and find someone else already there), then contract law is used to settle the matter: the OST determines which jurisdiction the offender falls within (based here on sovereignty laws over their equipment), and I take them to court. If that is not successful because they don't pay up and/or they are sheltered by the inept legal system of their host country, then the viral provisions of my land-use contract come into play and I am allowed to extract restitution from anyone who does business with the squatters. That includes people they export to, but also the companies which provided launch services or propellant, or anyone who provides goods or services to them (exempting only emergency humanitarian aid). If I am unsuccessful in extracting restitution from these companies, than I go one step higher. And so on and so forth.
(Of course there's a different type of squatting issue, where people make land-use claims and then sit on them unproductively. There are ways of dealing with this, such as a market-based annual upkeep fee, and I won't go into details of that here.)
In practice, the (non-profit) Land Claim Registry will have enacted legal agreements with the major launch providers, fuel depots, and other infrastructure companies, where they agree to take responsibility for breach of contract in a jurisdiction of the Land Claim Registry's choice. Of course to cover their own collective asses these companies will include standard clauses in their contracts making their customers liable for violations of land-use contracts, thereby giving them the option to pursue violators in a specific court as well.
Self-interest will make these clauses commonplace everywhere, probably as soon as the Registry is established. It will be impossible to do anything, anywhere in space without entering into a contract that makes you liable for your own violations of land-use rights. Thereby a web of contractual responsibilities is woven creating civil liabilities for violating clean bills of title from the Land Claim Registry, without any need for claims of national sovereignty over outer space.
Right of resale
Now we can return to the problem of bootstrapping space enterprise. Besides providing legal certainty and recourse against squatters & pirates, a land claim registry gives us an opportunity for intermediate liquidity events: the resale of a certificate of title either in whole to a mining company, or in shares to speculators on a market. Now the business plan is no longer a multi-decade endeavour, but instead can be summarized on a single powerpoint slide: (1) find resources; (2) register land claim; (3) profit! Such a business plan could reasonably be achieved on the 4 to 8 year investor timeline.
Further, if resale of shares of a land-use contract are allowed on an exchange, it becomes easy for companies and investors to discover the perceived value of discovered resources in various locations in the solar system, thereby eliminating a lot of guesswork (and therefore, risk). Additionally, the liquidity allows a lot of money to flow into the space economy, transferred from speculators to prospecting companies in the initial sale. Mining companies later buy these shares back to establish title.
Commodity markets
But there is still one more snag. Prospectors can cash-out early thanks to the Land Claim Registry, but what about mining companies? So long as we're still bootstrapping there will be very limited markets for in-situ resources, making it hard for any mining company to have revenue. And if there's not a chance for mining companies get investment dollars let alone turn a profit, then how can one expect there to be any market for land-use contracts?
The answer, once again, is markets. This time: mineral ores and refined products, warehoused at a couple of key distribution centers (with a separate market for each). Allow the deposit of assayed resources by mining companies, and redemption of ownership tokens for actual resources by customers. Trades of ownership is done electronically in high-speed computers in Earth's financial centers. (Aside: whereas the Land Claim Registry needs to be universal and therefore possibly non-profit, there could be many different, competing for-profit commodities markets.)
A mining company therefore knows when it is first seeking investment and at all stages of its operation what the commodity prices are. And once in operation, it can extract resources in whatever volume the market supports without worrying about having to find specific buyers. It could even buy PUT options to eliminate uncertainty due to the time it takes to transport product to market (orbital periods, etc.).
And since revenues are guaranteed at whatever rate the market can support once product is delivered, a mining operation itself can go from initial funding to product-on-market within the 4 to 8 year investment horizon.
Bootstrapping
I've used a hypothetical asteroid or lunar mining operation in my examples so far. This is no arbitrary choice: in-situ resources are the key to making space operations profitable and thereby opening economic development of the new frontier.
It is my informed belief that tourism, space station resupply, propellant depots, and the return to Earth of any significant platinum-group finds is enough business (barely) to fund a commercial mining operation, either to the Lunar poles or an asteroid which could be nudged into Earth orbit. In the process of extracting volatiles and platinum group metals, any such commercial operation would be foolish to leave money on the table by not also isolating and storing other ores that are in their way, or refined products that fall out of the extraction process. These in-situ resources are marginal profit for the mining operation, and are sold to future endeavors that need them, such as the construction of (sub-)surface habitats on the Moon, or as raw materials to industrial processes.
But there are ways in which we can further reduce uncertainty, making this bootstrapping process more of a sure thing:
(1) Start with attainable requirements for land claim registration, then step up the requirements as infrastructure is developed and claims are made. Maybe the first 250 NEO claims only require remote spectroscopy, determination of orbital parameters and physical characteristics, as well as multi-pixel resolution images. In other words, something that can be obtained with time on a large telescope, or during an Earth transit. Then the requirements step up to requiring sensing by a flyby or orbiter of up to X% of the surface to Ym resolution, with a specified suite of instruments (ground penetrating radar, magnetometer, gamma ray spectrometer, multi-spectral imager, etc.). At the next step the registry starts requiring global coverage of the object, samples with mass-spec analysis, and determination of the interior structure. Finally the requirements are adjusted upward to where they approximately match the assay requirements on Earth (including core samples and such).
(2) Use innovative financial instruments to make the share value of a commodity go up as production scales up. So an Early prototype mining mission that performs in-situ resource extraction and storage sells the resulting product by the microgram. (Remember, the product doesn't actually go anywhere. It just sits in storage while ownership changes hands by flipping bits in a computer on Earth.) As production ramps up in future missions, those original microgram shares become milligrams, then grams, then ultimately a kilogram or metric ton of refined material. I'll say less about this one because it's a commercial idea I'm currently working on (find me at NewSpace 2013 or the Mars Society conference if you're interested).
By bootstrapping in this way, we allow the markets to get going and price discovery to occur even during (or before!) the first prototype missions, which themselves might be paid for as a government ISRU demonstration mission. From then, enough information is available for investors to make informed choices about prospecting and mining operations, which themselves lead to the creation of an in-situ space economy and long-term, permanent habitation of the solar system.
Josh,
1) In the absence of a space elevator, what would make it cheaper to manufacture goods in space? As an industrialist, why would I choose to build car or refrigerator factories in cislunar space? How could it possibly be cheaper than investing in factories on Earth, where the hellish environment isn't trying to kill my workers, and shipping doesn't require mass drivers, single-use aerobrakes, chutes, and/or propulsive landing systems?
(If your response is the utility of trade even in the case of absolute advantage, than kudos to you for reading Adam Smith. However that presupposes the existence of an otherwise self-sufficient off-world colony whose choices are either manufacture for internal consumption or export, and therefore doesn't apply here.)
And by the way, machines are much, much harder to get right in space, and often more brittle. The reasons range from strange material properties in microgravity (e.g, rusticles short circuiting electronics, or lubricant not going where it needs to be) to the more mundane thermal stresses and electrical loads, to the difficulty of getting someone up there to repair it when something goes wrong.
2) I think you are doing yourself a disservice by ignoring tourism and related industries. The value of tourism is (a) you are selling an intangible experience, and therefore don't require large capital investments, and (b) it transfers Terran wealth off-world. Both properties are essential for bootstrapping, which is why many people look to tourism as a way to bootstrap larger space endeavours.
Here's a hypothetical plan, that hopefully gets my point across: start a company selling a vacation package to a private space station. It starts out as a single inflatable module (with a nice viewport) and a single dragon spacecraft acting as crew transport vehicle, lifeboat and tug. Bring up extra equipment on each flight, eventually turning the unused corners of the station into a commercial research park. As launch prices fall and initial costs are recouped, start launching on F9H instead, taking with you an extra module to expand the station, or fuel for the now developed fuel depot. Use that infrastructure to assemble a pricey lunar lander mission, which you launch every 6mo or so. Each tourist trip to the Moon leaves behind a module and some equipment, and over a few years you assemble enough to start permanent habitation and/or local industrial production.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. The above is a plan I just made up, and certainly not the best path forward. But in the continued absence of investment dollars or a sudden outbreak of common sense in government, it is a viable and reasonable bootstrapping method.
But yes, in the long term tourism will be a small, small part of the extraterrestrial economy.
The stuff I came up with is extremely experimental, but it handled as if it were commercial Styrofoam (somewhere near 0.03 g/cc). I used 0.2 inches of it in a ramjet combustor running at almost 4000 F, and it withstood the extremely-violent effects of rich blow-out combustion instability repeatedly, while serving for hours of accumulated burn in dozens of tests. I cannot go that hot for entry, I must avoid shrinkage cracks by staying under 2350 F, just like shuttle tile. but, that's where refractories can take us. I think they are the ultimate winner for entry heat shielding.
Have you patented this? You should think about doing so.
This will be my first Mars Society convention if I go, but I've been to many of these sorts of conferences before. I'm sure you will find something interesting on the speaker track, but generally it's the "hallway track" that you go for - face to face networking with people you may only know from names on a paper. In other words, it's not to hear about the results being presented, but to setup collaborations that result in the next series of projects.
