A short musing about the practicality of human spaceflight

SpaceX's recent successful launch is a good thing, but even if ultimately successful, it will still be an expensive proposition to get into space.

Let's say Elon Musk gets the cost of launch down an order of magnitude.  That would mean a Falcon 9 launch of about 5 million bucks.  If you send 6 astronauts into space on his rocket, that would mean about a million apiece.  Not exactly cheap.

What kind of business could you run when it costs a million bucks to send each one of your people into space?

Let's take platinum mining in the asteroid belt.  Lots of platinum there.  If you send miners there, its going to cost a million bucks each for the miners plus their life support and other facilities.  Those won't be cheap, either.  The same cost for setting up those as getting the astronauts into space.  Unless you get all of your building materials from space itself.  If you build a space sail, you can get there with no propellant.  If you recycle everything, you can make your own food and produce your own life support.  That would require energy.  But the initial costs of getting the stuff up there in the first place remains.  Therefore, it pays to keep people up there once they arrive.

A million dollars worth of platinum is 52 pounds.  It would seem that you would need some multiple of this to make it all worthwhile.  After all, the astronaut is going to spend a lot of time up there.  Another portion of it would be to defray costs for his living expenses ( which means the means by which he can live ) and another portion for his own to keep.  Perhaps 3 times the 52 pounds which computes to 156 pounds of platinum per astronaut.  The company would want another 3 for itself.  That's 312 pound each.  Multiplied by 6 astronauts and you get about a thousand pounds of payload on the return.  Would 3 for the company be enough?  Probably not.  There's risk involved, so $3 million profit per mission won't be enough.

There are other costs to consider.  Trying to make a profit off of just one mission will not be enough.  But a series of missions could be used to pay off permanent facilities in space.  The permanent facilities could be the mining ship itself and to fully outfit her with everything needed for propulsion and life support.

For life support, there would be a need for a machine that could recycle everything and the energy to do it.  Since you are using solar energy anyway, there will be plenty of that.

Technically, it looks like it could be feasible.

So, it is all financially feasible?  Once it gets rolling, it will be insurable and it could be financed.  Then you pay the interest and generate the necessary income to pay for the expenses and interest with a reasonable profit.  So far so good.

Then there's taxes.  Perhaps the astronauts wouldn't want to risk their lives for making money if the government takes most of that hard earned money away from them.  Then perhaps, they can start permanent colonies that could trade with the Earth.  They could earn money to pay a rocket company to send their families along after a few profitable trips.

A practical business model?  Perhaps not.  Just running some numbers to see if it all could work.  If people are going to populate space, there will eventually have to be some sort of economic incentive for them to do so.