Asteroids by Martin Elvis

Author:Martin Elvis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300231922
Publisher: Yale University Press

PART

IV

Opportunity

8

Getting Space off the Ground

Now we know what the asteroids could mean for our three motives: curiosity about the universe, what we have to fear from them, and how they might make us rich. Just how are we really going to fulfill any of these longings? Now is a good time to begin working toward all these goals. Space is wide open. There are a whole slew of changes happening in the space industry that could provide the opportunity for us to start mining the asteroids. They range from new technologies through new ways of doing business to new industries in orbit. Taken together, this NewSpace lets us sketch out a plausible path from here to a full-fledged profitable industry that makes use of space resources. And we need to make profits from space if we are to reach our goals.

Space already has a sizable economic impact. Worldwide in 2018, space was a $360 billion a year industry, according to the annual Global Space Economy Report from Bryce Space and Technology, whose CEO is Carissa Christensen.1 That sounds impressive. Yet it is only about 1/2 percent of the world economy and is less than the revenue of the giant retailer Walmart. Around a third of the total space industry comes from “public goods,” those provided by governments but now utilized for profit by businesses. Before continuous high-quality weather satellites, forecasts were pretty hit or miss. Now they can be trusted several days in advance. This is due to a combination of vastly better computing capabilities and the vastly better data that weather satellites give us. Weather data is supplied free of charge and already processed into predictions by governments. This system works. It saves lives with accurate hurricane tracking, among other things, and gives a great boost to the economy by letting us plan around bad weather. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is also a public good. Originally a military tool, GPS is now ubiquitous, essential, and free. GPS-based satellite navigation has been coupled with smartphones and has given us Uber, Waze, and dozens of other apps. Its accurate clocks are used by banks to time stamp transactions. GPS and its siblings are so big that a quarter of the space economy lies just in GPS chip making. That’s not what we normally think of as a space activity, yet really it is one. The rest of space activities are truly profit-making commerce. The biggest part is made up of communications satellites, mainly providing broadcast TV, which accounts for nearly another quarter of the space economy. The business most obviously about space is making rockets and satellites, but that accounts for only about a tenth of the total. Our problem is that nothing commercial is yet built in space. There is no industry actually in space. That limits the customer base for asteroid-supplied materials.

What are the prospects for commercial growth in space? There are new space-based industries now emerging, from small satellites for imaging the Earth daily, or even hourly, to global high-speed internet access.

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