SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell says city-to-city rocket travel will be ready 'within a decade'

[Vulcanproject]

If you have to travel somewhere quickly you take a Concorde. Except that didn't work because it was too expensive, too noisy, (at least according to some moaners) so it had limited routes, and the internet was faster for anything that important even by the 1990s.

So you think a much more expensive rocket, which is much noisier, much more dangerous, with less places to land safely and still isn't faster than the internet is going to be viable commercially.

No chance anytime soon if Concorde didn't work.

 

[RobStow]

Be ready in a decade. Here we go. Maybe, maybe not. Most "scientists" when they say things like this, really mean "we have no clue."

So, Mars, and intercity rocket travel, what else? Asteroid mining, bottling hydrogen from the Sun?

It will be interesting to see if this happens, but as I see it, it might just be more distraction from the upcoming May, 2018 Tesla earnings report - which, again, is expected to be seriously negative.

Not much point in "bottling hydrogen from the sun" - we have, quite literally, oceans full of it that we can separate from the water far, far, far, far, far (is that enough "fars" ?) more easily and cheaply than we could ever get it from the sun. In case no one has told you yet, the sun is HOT - anything we send close enough to the sun to reach useful densities of hydrogen (or any other gas) is going to melt very quickly.

Now He3 would be a different story. Once we figure out how to do the easiest fusion - deuterium + tritium - then the next step will be the harder but possibly more profitable aneutronic fusions with either He3+He3 or He3+deuterium. The solar winds have deposited He3 on the moon for billions of year - we just have to get there again and figure out how to mine it economically. The atmospheres of the gas giants are thought to hold more He3 than the moon's surface ... but they are a loooong way away and dealing with their gravity wells will be a huge issue.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

Let's see...3 hours to get to the jetport...2 hours to get thru security...boarding, move to gantry, clearance, ignition - perhaps another hour...flight time to coast about 37 minutes..then landing...uh, yes, um, landing, ha, never really thought about that....um.

Thought about it a bit. The guy who figures out 'landing' will make a unicorn fortune, the rest of it already works pretty well.... maybe a really humongous feather bed.

 

[mbrowne5061]

Asteroid mining would be cool, but few probably want to tackle it at the moment because it would almost certainly be more expensive than similarly mined materials on Earth.

Well, yes and no. Mining an asteroid out in the belt? Yeah, too expensive. Mining an asteroid that was captured as it flew by earth? Probably not. A single Iron-Nickel asteroid has as much Iron and Nickel in it as all of the metals (all of them) as humanity has mined in its entire history. Pretty easy to leverage economies of scale to make that profitable.

The bigger economic story is, without there being a demand for that much Iron and Nickel, you would effectively crash the price of these two metals. Earth-bound miners would be smaller operations and likely flounder in the collapse, and the asteroid miners would be the only ones left. What those prices would do to the rest of the economy though? Who knows. Construction costs would plummet, as well as anything else that used Iron and Nickel - but would those falling costs offset the jobs lost from the collapse of entire sections of the mining industry? Hard to say.

 

[RobStow]

Well, yes and no. Mining an asteroid out in the belt? Yeah, too expensive. Mining an asteroid that was captured as it flew by earth? Probably not. A single Iron-Nickel asteroid has as much Iron and Nickel in it as all of the metals (all of them) as humanity has mined in its entire history. Pretty easy to leverage economies of scale to make that profitable.

The bigger economic story is, without there being a demand for that much Iron and Nickel, you would effectively crash the price of these two metals. Earth-bound miners would be smaller operations and likely flounder in the collapse, and the asteroid miners would be the only ones left. What those prices would do to the rest of the economy though? Who knows. Construction costs would plummet, as well as anything else that used Iron and Nickel - but would those falling costs offset the jobs lost from the collapse of entire sections of the mining industry? Hard to say.

It doesn't really matter where you mine the nickel/iron asteroid - it will never impact Earth's mining industry just because it will be too expensive to get it down here intact and in large quantities. You can't just smelt an ingot in space then throw it down to the earth's surface or you will be turning a *LOT* of gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy ... and then what doesn't melt off your ingot on the way down will go "boom" when it hits the surface.

Shipping something down from orbit will require containers to protect it from the re-entry heat, engines to guide it, fuel for those engines, guidance systems, etc, ... all of which are expensive. Thus what gets mined in space will stay in space and go towards developing separate economies out there... unless you can turn those mined raw materials into very high value finished products. The trade between the Earth's economy and the orbital/Lunar/Martian economies will be limited to very high value items that make it worth the high costs of shipping things between those regions. Information and things that benefit from being manufactured in microgravity might have enough value to make them worth trading between Earth and the off-Earth economies. Common raw materials like nickel and iron never will.