<aside> ❓ What are the commercially feasible uses of deep space (ie Moon / Mars / asteroids)? Are there any things that are better done there than on Earth, or is expansion and infrastructure always going to be driven by public investment and philanthropy?
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Current belief: There are very few or no uses. Asteroid mining, and possible Mars-based supply of asteroid mining facilities, is the only realistic use within view. Space settlement advocates seem to have unrealistically utopian views of the pull to settlement. However, this is not to say that settlement could not happen, e.g. driven by significant public investment for scientific or military reasons, or sufficiently motivated private individuals.
Is There A Fortune To Be Made On Mars?
Manufacturing:
Orbital manufacturing is a valid commercial use of space
Much is possible in LEO, but case for manufacturing further away seems weaker.
Mining and agriculture, e.g. asteroid mines supplied by Martian farms:
Mars's role seems only to support the asteroid mines. Asteroid mines may economically provide cobalt and platinum group metals to Earth, and iron and nickel for space construction, after a large space-based refining effort. Might depend on demand for space construction.
Covered in Zubrin's Case for Space in some detail:
IP production:
“I don’t think it’s going to be economical to mine things on Mars and then transport them back to Earth because the transport costs would overwhelm the value of whatever you mined, but there will likely be a lot of mining on Mars that’s useful for a Mars base, but it’s unlikely to be transferred back to Earth. I think the economic exchange between a Mars base and Earth would be mostly in the form of intellectual property” — Elon Musk
“Another alternative is that Mars could pay for itself by transporting back ideas. Just as the labor shortage prevalent in colonial and 19th century America drove the creation of Yankee ingenuity’s flood of inventions, so the conditions of extreme labor shortage combined with a technological culture and the unacceptability of impractical legislative constraints against innovation will tend to drive Martian ingenuity to produce wave after wave of invention in energy production, automation and robotics, biotechnology, and other areas. These inventions, licensed on Earth, could finance Mars even as they revolutionize and advance terrestrial living standards as forcefully as 19th Century American invention changed Europe and ultimately the rest of the world as well.” — Robert Zubrin
Also covered in Case for Space as part of a general narrative that Mars settlement is comparable to American settlement, complete with absence of stifling and short-sighted government. To me it seems to dramatically overstate the importance of IP in powering US settlement, compared to abundant natural resources and productive land that anyone could settle. Ingenuity as a secondary product when people are already drawn to a frontier place is great, but who migrated to the US so they could innovate more freely? What is pulling people to Mars to begin with, given the significantly harsher environment? And if super-valuable innovation is driven only by extreme constraints, why hasn't anyone got rich from innovations developed in the simulated Mars habitats on Earth?
I am not currently aware of any human space industrialization schemes that could make money. Indeed, it is clear that human space exploration is very expensive and the time frame over which this project must be executed spans longer than any non-government investor could be interested. At best, many many decades are needed for a modest financial ROI, and requiring only a few dozen miracles.
That said, governments and organizations routinely spend huge sums of money employing people with a range of technical skills to work on projects of dubious economic merit, because cost and profit are not the only important considerations. In particular, all advanced nations have space programs for prestige and strategic investment in domestic aerospace expertise. - Casey Handmer