Dr. Anomaly Posted July 1, 2009 Report Share Posted July 1, 2009 Re: What would happen - and at what cost? Something else that could be an economic reason for doing manufacturing off the Earth, if the posited cheap transport were available: pollution. Given a relatively cheap way to travel, and a supply of the most needed bulk raw materials somewhere else (asteroids, Mars, moons of Jupiter, whatever) I could see a corp going: "Hmmm. Comply with all the environmental regulations here, which is very costly, or move our production to a place without an environment to worry about [and no in-place regulations about what we can dump into it]? Let's take a look at a cost/benefit analysis and see which is cheaper, or which improves our bottom line more." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sinanju Posted July 2, 2009 Report Share Posted July 2, 2009 Re: What would happen - and at what cost? Something else that could be an economic reason for doing manufacturing off the Earth, if the posited cheap transport were available: pollution. Given a relatively cheap way to travel, and a supply of the most needed bulk raw materials somewhere else (asteroids, Mars, moons of Jupiter, whatever) I could see a corp going: "Hmmm. Comply with all the environmental regulations here, which is very costly, or move our production to a place without an environment to worry about [and no in-place regulations about what we can dump into it]? Let's take a look at a cost/benefit analysis and see which is cheaper, or which improves our bottom line more." Melinda Snodgrass wrote a trilogy of SF novels about Lawyers in Space! No, really. It was about orbital habitats and lunar and martian colonies which were trying to assert their independence from the governments of earth while said governments were doing their best to exploit the living **** out of them. The martians had a plan to terraform Mars. The EPA demanded that they complete an Environmental Impact Study first, which would take years and effectively derail the scheme. The Martians countered with the following EIS, which I quote in full: "No environment. No impact." This went over about as well as you'd expect. There was...trouble. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nyrath Posted July 2, 2009 Report Share Posted July 2, 2009 Re: What would happen - and at what cost? At what mass / velocity do you have direct impact or a large enough fireball? I don't know. It becomes complicated, with estimating dissipation rates and such. I suspect that the math becomes quite complicated. But you might find this interesting http://www.diane-neisius.de/tunguska/index_E.html along with this terrifying artist conception http://tizona.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/russian-scientist-ufo-self-sacrificed-to-save-earth-at-tunguska/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mallet Posted July 2, 2009 Report Share Posted July 2, 2009 Re: What would happen - and at what cost? I'm no scientist, but I would think making use of the temperature extremes in space could be quite beneficial and cost effective. Move something to the right position in direct sunlight and have it super heated/ melted in seconds, move it to another location in the shade and have it freeze to super cold temperatures. I would think that would be nice, given the energy, money and pollution required to heat and freeze objects during manufacturing here on Earth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nyrath Posted July 5, 2009 Report Share Posted July 5, 2009 Re: What would happen - and at what cost? I'm no scientist, but I would think making use of the temperature extremes in space could be quite beneficial and cost effective. Move something to the right position in direct sunlight and have it super heated/ melted in seconds, move it to another location in the shade and have it freeze to super cold temperatures. I would think that would be nice, given the energy, money and pollution required to heat and freeze objects during manufacturing here on Earth. The truism is that in space, energy is cheap but materials are expensive. Which is more or less the opposite of the situation here on Earth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azato Posted July 5, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 5, 2009 Re: What would happen - and at what cost? I am not totally sure that is true. I work for a major manufacture of construction and mining equipment and our largest structures - the facility I work at - the castings for some of our largest vehicles come from China. In general, most of the major US foundries are out if business we receive most of our castings by boat and then rail/truck. Even our company is going on the foundry business http://www.toughquip.com/Caterpillar-Off-Highway-Truck-Models.htm In fact, one of our major foundry, located reasonable close to the internal customers (peoria, il and lafayette, in) is being largely moved to Mexico. http://www.jobbankusa.com/News/Jobs/jobs120304a.html Given a cheap method of getting into space, there are materials worth mining. Given mining, manufacturing will move into space for two reasons: building and repairing mining machinery, and building and repairing refinery machinery --- no matter how cheap to/from orbit travel is, there are enormous savings to be had by reducing the mass to be moved. Hence refineries, hence manufacturing. Once that manufacturing base is in place, there's a strong impetus to increase the amount of mining, which leads to increased populations, which will want more than the bare necessities, which leads to manufacturing more than mining and refinery gear, which leads to.... And so on, and so forth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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