Jun
20
Written by:
admin
6/20/2010 10:05 AM
The third stage of The Plan involves using revenues developed in the first two stages, along with science and technology developed by GTFH Aerospace Services to build a sustainable business model in orbit. It's somewhat difficult to tell this far in advance what businesses might be profitable in such an environment, but we are able to make some educated guesses.
The first, of course, is tourism. We have already witnessed several people willing to pay between $20 million and $50 million to spend a week at the International Space Station. Unfortunately, that is not a sustainable business model, because eventually we'd run out of massively wealthy people willing to spend that kind of money on a vacation. Additionally, that money does not come close to even making a dent in the operating budget of the ISS. So obviously two things would be needed for a sustainable orbital tourism market: reduction in costs to operate the destination, and an increase in the capacity of people to get people there. Volume is the key to this kind of activity, and for that, the price must be lowered to a point where more people are willing to partake, and those with a lot of money are willing to make the trip more frequently.
Tourism is not the only possible business activity, however. It turns out that there is a great deal of research that can be conducted in microgravity (which is a part of the reason why NASA has been launching people on the space shuttles for the past 30 years and to the ISS for the past 12). It seems reasonable that an organization that provides services to the government—GTFH Aerospace Services, for example—could provide those services in orbit as well as on the ground. So GTFH Orbital also expands the reach of GTFH Aerospace Services.
Moreover, there are certain compounds, especially crystalline structures, that are simpler to manufacture without the major influence of gravity. Doing so in orbit would allow for purer samples to be created, and might allow for some substances that simply cannot be created on Earth. Whether or not these compounds can be created and delivered back to Earth for an economical price remains to be seen, and thus should not be a first-line option.
The last option we want to mention at this time is materials gathering and processing. Far from being empty, space is filled with a vast amount of resources. Near-Earth asteroids containing trillions of dollars worth of materials (at today's market rates) are abundant. Some of the materials that are contained in reasonable amounts these asteroids (like platinum and iridium) are very rare and valuable on Earth. However, it once again remains to be seen if these materials can be harvested and brought down to Earth at a reasonable enough price to justify the expense of getting to them. Nevertheless, this should be an area of focus for one simple reason: because if these materials are hard to get to on Earth, they are far more difficult to get to in orbit. Imagine how much more cost-effective it would be to manufacture communications satellites in orbit and simply deploy them where they already are, rather than constructing them on Earth and launching them on rockets (which occasionally fail) for an outlandish sum of money!
And on that track, once you have the matierals in orbit, it is also a fairly simple matter to repair malfunctioning satellites that are already in orbit with you, rather than de-orbiting them and launching new ones. Satellites that are in declining orbits could be reboosted or even refueled by the orbital operations of GTFH.
And eventually, when we're ready to move to the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids, and beyond, the industrial facilities we have in orbit would be used to build the vessels we would need to get us to those destinations and provide support to our fledgling operations in the next stage.
So what are we waiting for? Let's get started!
Not so fast, I'm afraid. Remember how we mentioned several times above that a lot of these potential lines of business are only profitable (and therefore sustainable) if we can get up to orbit and bring stuff back down for a cost reasonable to the market? After all, nobody is going to pay a million dollars per ounce of platinum if that's what it costs us to get to it and bring it back down.
The single largest stumbling block to pushing forward with this stage is the cost of getting to orbit. While large improvements are being made in that arena (thanks to SpaceX and others), we believe that a decline of at least an order of magnitude or two in cost-to-orbit will be necessary before orbital space can be developed profitably.
It might be that breakthroughs in science and technology are necessary. It may be that we need a space elevator or a maglev launch system. It may be that we can develop some means of controlling gravity, and that would get us to orbit much more cheaply and safely than any other solution. Or it may be something that we have not yet dreamed of. But we do not believe that the long-term solution will ever be to strap ourselves into rockets, even though rockets are currently the best option available to us (and would be essential to constructing a space elevator, at the very least).
One of the reasons that GTFH Aerospace Services is an interim step between GTFH Media and GTFH Orbital is so that GTFH Aerospace can contribute to developing the science and technology that will enable GTFH Orbital to be sustainably established. If somebody else does not figure out how to get us to orbit in a cost-effective manner, then we'll have to do it ourselves.
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