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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I think the pure economics side of you argument makes a large category error; you model what is a complex, dynamic system as a linear one.

Let's focus on just this part of it:

Keeping an astronaut on the ISS costs about $1M/astronaut per day. And this is a space station that is relatively close to earth. Of course low earth orbit (LEO) where the ISS is, is halfway to most places in the inner solar system in terms of Delta V, so we're probably not talking about more than $10M/day per person for a Mars mission. For a colony on Mars with 100 people, that's close to a billion dollars a day. There is no national government, or corporation on earth that could support that.

Even if technology development by industry leaders such as SpaceX lowers launch costs by 1,000x, which I find to be an absurd proposition, that's still $1 million/day with no return on investment.

The argument simply multiplies the ISS daily cost by a Delta-V multiplier and then by a headcount of 100. This is mathematically illiterate in industrial contexts.

I won't walk through it step by step because ain't nobody got time for that it's probably more effective to just bulletize the concepts you overlooked:

  • Experience Curve Effect aka Wright's Law. As we do things more and more, we get compounding returns to efficiency. 1,000x declines aren't at all "absurd."
  • Learning by Doing related to Experience Curve Effects. Supports and expands it.
  • Endogenous growth theory. A little broad, but the key is in spillover effects and knowledge transfers that can create a generative cycle. We learn by going to space and some of that knowledge creates new advantages in non-space industries (i'd bet on fuels and materials specifically). That causes efficiency gains and cost reductions in other industries which frees up capital for more CapEx and OpEx intensive things ... like space exploration. The cycle turns again and again. Positive sum games.
  • Induced innovation. Again, kind of a supporter thread of Endogenous Growth Theory. I like to think of this one as "unlocking the tech tree." One technological innovation can create a whole new cost and supply reality for another technology which allows development in the other technology that was previously cost prohibitive. A good example here might be the power efficiency gains in touch screen displays that made SmartPhones actually viable circa 2007. Before then, anything that was battery operated and mobile couldn't have colorful, high brightness displays because the effective battery life would be like an hour. Anyone who had an oldschool ThinkPad remembers this.
  • A little more "out there" but In-Situ Resource Utilization. This is using non-Earth based resources to help support a long term space ecology / economy / industry. Yes, yes it's very Sci-Fi, but the interaction of the concepts I outlined above paints a picture for how ISRU would emerge.

The book-of-books, imho, on Technological Progress is Mokyr's Lever of Riches. One of the primary points he repeats again is that Technological Progress cannot at all be modeled linearly - it's far too complex for that. Second, that so many major technological breakthroughs were products of recombinatorial innovation - i.e. the borrowing of knowledge between domains to develop a novel approach to a problem.

These are the reason to support Space Exploration even if you don't really care about Moon / Mars colonization. These under explored domains will probably have returns to more conventional domains. "Why can't we just focus on those conventional domains in the first place?" Re-read the above paragraph. It doesn't work that way. Technological Progress is a lot of semi-random happy accidents that collide back together to do wonderful things. In many cases, there can be huge amounts of CapEx and investment with nothing to show for it ... until this everything to show for it. Moreover, sometimes solving one problem requires some counter intuition.

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