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With SpaceX's Starship having finished it's static fire tests they will soon be gearing up for the first orbital launch. So far, space travel and industry have avoided getting polarized (although Musk has gotten some frankly ridiculous hit pieces for the whole Ukraine Starlink fiasco), but I don't expect this to continue as it gets cheaper and easier to sent things to and from space.
If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3 million/ton. That means that if you want to get a ton of material into space, you're shelling out quite a bit. This limits space endeavours to major governments or multinational corporations for the most part.
According to Musk, Starship will be able to lower the cost to only $20,000 per metric ton to get into space. This is multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost reduction. Now I'm not super optimistic this number will be hit anytime soon, but if it is, it will enter us into a new era when it comes to space and technology.
My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.
I'm curious if anyone else has more fleshed out ideas on this topic, in terms of how space industry will affect the Culture War. Or do most of y'all think this is a non-starter and nobody will care about space in 5-10 years?
If it's successful I think the left is most likely to just ignore it. Excellence in American industry doesn't serve their purposes. What the right will do is hard to say, populism and suspicion of elites make interesting bedfellows with the likes of Musk but the right does contain factions that will be absolutely enthralled to see him succeed and because of his more recent mask off plays at the expense of the left he will probably find a home on the right.
How it all shakes out will probably depend on which industries actually have most immediate use for cheap(er) launches. Besides the obvious satalite uses and space tourism the immediate impact is harder for me to grasp. This isn't to say it won't be huge and disruptive, I just won't even hazard a guess at how it will be.
Mining seems to be one obvious game changer if there are very valuable materials we don’t have a lot of but could use a lot of.
Yes, that's the ultimate jackpot. However that still seems decades off, even with my fairly bullish stance on space.
As with so many things in space, I think the timeline is driven by one binary variable: does SpaceX's vision of a rapidly reusable Starship come to fruition?
If it does, asteroid mining goes from a pipe dream to a reality in the blink of an eye. So many things that work in principle work in reality once you can toss a hundred tons to orbit every day of the week.
doing complicated construction in space and getting autonomous miners where they need to be, then maneuvering the mined material back to earth and getting it back down is the kind of thing that has hundreds of steps just as hard as being able to reuse the rockets. Hell, if you asked someone smart who didn't already know how hard of a problem it was having reusable launch crafts probably wouldn't even come up on their list of hard problems.
Oh, certainly, I'm not saying the only thing holding us back from von Neumann probes and a Dyson sphere is mass to orbit! But if you skip autonomy, on orbit mining, and on-orbit manufacturing, you can still make a business case for the simplest asteroid mining possible:
Identify asteroid with 100 tons of platinum
Launch intercept/dock mission a la Hayabusa
Slow burn for intercept course with Earth using ion propulsion a la Dawn (not to mention Starlink and a million Soviet spacecraft)
Crash it in the desert and recover contents
100 tons of platinum is only a couple billion dollars, so this only works once launch prices for the monstrous probe necessary for something like this are reasonable and you can cut costs on the probe by removing the anal mass optimization currently necessary.
This is obviously far less revolutionary than true asteroid mining with on-orbit processing and manufacturing, which is what will kickstart the off-Earth economy, if we ever get there. Still, it's a start.
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