Key points

• Much cheaper launch costs will enable significant new businesses in LEO and deep space.
• In LEO, Earth point-to-point travel will be the largest business, and other businesses include orbital tourism, orbital manufacturing and manufacturing-related R&D, and constellation satellite internet.
  • There will also be a need for a more complex military presence, with flexible fighter satellites rather than just ground-based anti-satellite weapons.
• Moon potentially useful for processes that need vacuum (but not zero-G), and large-scale scientific facilities such as telescope arrays.
  • The moon does not make sense as an intermediate destination for other worlds. It takes as much delta-v to get to the surface of the Moon from LEO as it does to go to Mars.
• In deep space, it is probably economically feasible to mine asteroids, using the iron and nickel in space and returning the cobalt and platinum group metals to Earth. It is critical to refine the metals in space because moving the whole heavy asteroid (which is mostly useless rock) is inefficient.
  • In turn, because it is much easier to get supplies to the asteroid belt from Mars, it may be feasible to fund a Mars colony by exporting supplies (e.g. food) to asteroids. Note that RZ seems to assume human presence in asteroids is critical, but almost-entirely robotic mining might be much easier, which could undermine this?
• RZ provides a few other ideas for economic settlement of Moon/Mars/asteroids which seem hand-wavy to me:
  • Helium-3 or deuterium extraction — but these dependent on fusion development.
  • Repeated comparisons to the settlement of the American frontier, which seem misplaced to me - value of land, ability to allocate it, and difficulty of settling it is dramatically different. Don't think we could expect the same migration pull.
  • Vague ideas about developing IP due to hardship - perhaps secondary, but doesn't seem like enough as primary motivation. Could enforce the same hardship on Earth if you wanted to.
  • Utopian ideas about trying out new types of governance in independent asteroid colonies.

Kindle highlights

L101 Yet SpaceX did it, in half the time and at a thirtieth of the cost. And, to cap it all, the launch vehicle is three-quarters reusable.

L107 A reusable rocket system that can send 60 or 150 tons to orbit can also send 60 or 150 tons from New York to Sydney in less than an hour. For comparison, a Boeing 737 has an empty weight of 45 tons.

L209 the energy to send a spacecraft to orbit is about the same as that required to fly a jet from Los Angeles to Sydney and back.

L226 The central institutional impediment to space progress is the system of cost-plus contracting the government has put into place in the very foolish belief that the price of hardware could best be kept under control by regulating contractors to charge their documented costs plus a modest set profit rate (of perhaps 8–10 percent).

L236 we at one point had more than thirteen thousand people at our primary facility, with fewer than one thousand working in the factory—leading one wit to scoff, “At Martin Marietta, overhead is our most important product.”

L319 But if it could get three hundred launches, only $4 million per launch would be needed. Note:Assumes launch costs are fixed?? Seems wrong

L494 Even with full reusability, if we want to get the cost per launch down by a factor of a hundred, we are going to need a market for at least a hundred times as many launches.

L496 It won't be led by satellite launch—that market (about one hundred launches per year globally at last count) is far too small,

L498 But there is a much larger space launch market waiting to be opened, and that is long-distance rapid passenger travel around the Earth.

L507 There are dozens of worthwhile routes, collectively providing a market for tens of thousands of flights per year.

L515 the amount of propellant needed will greatly outweigh the payload.

L580 More broadly, if you want any rocket vehicle to achieve a ∆V more than twice its exhaust velocity, you need to use more than one stage.

L610 Orbital research labs that take advantage of the unique zero-gravity and high-vacuum environments available in low Earth orbit could also be producing a profit in the relatively near future.