United Launch Alliance Plans For 1,000 People Working In Space By 2045 (blastingnews.com)

What if you could produce rocket fuel in outer space -- making it 83% cheaper? One company sees this as the basis a self-sustaining "space economy" based on refueling Earth-orbiting spaceships. Slashdot reader MarkWhittington writes: Jeff Bezos, of both Amazon and Blue Origin, may ruminate about moving a lot of industry off the planet, but the United Launch Alliance, that joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, has a concrete plan to do so. ULA is working on an idea to have 1,000 people operating in Earth-moon space by 2045, less than 30 years away...

Comments

Re: Working? Why?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Right now, the obvious choices (perhaps in a decreasing order of probability of taking place) are: cheaper GEO operations, actual feasibility of cleaning up orbital junk, way cheaper heavy scientific missions into the solar system, Apollo-style lunar missions in the several-billion-dollar range (>10x-30x cheaper than Apollo was), a lunar base for the same capital and operating costs as the ISS is right now (which ultimately prove to be politically feasible), and finally a reasonable pathway to a mission to Mars. One somewhat less obvious but perhaps not so far-fetched idea is that this could eventually bootstrap an infrastructure for ultimately extracting fuel from NEO asteroids, or even places like Ceres, where we know there's a shitload of water but in a much shallower gravity well (the Moon kind of sucks in this respect - less than the Earth but it still sucks).