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?

[Tyr07]

I guess you didn't even read the slashdot version of the article that says they can do it 83% cheaper in space...you know 'we need something that is cheaper in space than on earth'\

But your anonymous coward post does suggest you're most likely a troll or the article submitter trying to get comments.

Too Late :-(

[cusco]

This should have been happening in the 1980s and '90s, except that Congress decided that killing brown people was more profitable for their true constituents in the MIC. In the 1970s I (and almost everyone else) assumed that we would have people living and working in space within the next decade. Now forty years later we still only have a (comparatively) small lab in LEO. By the time Bezos and the few other visionaries finally get their operations under way I'll be far too old to go.

If I ever spend any time in California I'll make it a point to go to the grave sites of Nixon and Reagan and piss all over them

Re:Too Late :-(

[LWATCDR]

Actually you should seek out Kennedy and Johnson. They got the US into Vietnam and before anyone posts how Kennedy would have gotten us out of Vietnam the facts are that at no time during the Kennedy administration did the number of US military in Vietnam go down. Nixon got the US out of Vietnam and as far as I know Reagan Except for some small actions did not start a war killing brown people as you put it.
https://www.google.com/imgres?...

If you take a look yes Nixon and congress made massive cuts after Apollo because of the cost of the Vietnam war started by Kennedy and Johnson but it was still higher then Clinton and Obama. Reagan's funding level was also higher than Obama. Why the venom for those people?
 

Re:Too Late :-(

[cusco]

Actually, no. Not even when adjusted for inflation. Nixon inherited Apollo, which had lost more than half its budget by the time he was booted out of office, and never has risen above 1% of the Federal budget since. Democrats re-inserted spending on programs over Ronnie Raygun's objections, but the Pentagon had gotten it's claws sunk well into NASA's budgetary belly and it ended up footing the bill for a large chunk of his Star Wars boondoggle. Military contractors such as Boeing (where my roommate worked at the time) also took to dumping their cost overrides onto NASA projects (at least six of his paychecks for building cruise missiles were expensed to the Space Shuttle). Last year's non-official Pentagon budget (Black Budget, the alphabet soup of intel agencies, "war fighting" allocations, etc.) was larger than NASA's entire budget, which depending on how military spending is counted falls somewhere between 1/35 and 1/50 of the Pentagram's budget.

Re:Too Late :-(

[cusco]

Just another note:

Here's a simple example of how much money the MIC has to waste: NASA recently acquired two cast-off satellites from the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the more obscure alphabet-soup intel agencies, for free. They are both Hubble-class instruments that have been stored in a nitrogen-filled warehouse for most of a decade simply as spares for an unknown number of spacecraft that they have in orbit. The NRO is foisting them off on NASA because they're obsolete and have been replaced with something apparently even more powerful. NASA went hat in hand to Congress pleading for the relatively minimal funds to equip and launch them, less than the yearly spare parts budget for just the B-52 fleet, and were initially denied until they had sacrificed some other program's budget.

R.E. Reagan; either 1984 or 1986 (can't remember which) was the first, but not last, year when just the NSA had a larger budget for launches than NASA.

making it for the robot astronauts?

[turkeydance]

why not have the robots make it?

Re:making it for the robot astronauts?

[Tyr07]

Part of the reason is handling abstract solution to problems. Once all the original construction issues are hashed out, the problems they run into figured out by humans, eventually with that expertise you could have robotics develop expanding facilities or new ones, but for the first ones being built having humans performing the work and analyzing the situation would probably work out better. Robots are currently great if we know all the variables and potential issues from the start to design them with that in mind, but in the new frontier of construction where applicable humans should make the better choice.

Re:making it for the robot astronauts?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Maybe the idea is to do whatever turns out to be more practical, with the proviso that either option requires largely the same infrastructure? Whether you ultimately decide to send humans or robots can be decided later.

Re:Doing What

[ultranova]

at what point will it be cheeping to sustain a human in space than a robot

Probably never, if only because nobody will weep for a dead robot. But that doesn't matter, because the real motive to put people into space is that we're living beings and life expands to fill all available habitats. "Space jobs" is simply a disguise to get that primal urge past capitalist bean counting.

Monopolies and restricted resources

[petes_PoV]

So the plan is to use the extremely scarce water on the Moon to make hydrogen for rocket fuel. Since this is a "better" choice than making rocket fuel on Earth, which is two-thirds water?

This sounds like a very short-sighted proposition as it consumes a resource that could be put to far better use for lunar colonisation.

It also puts the nascent LEO -> "out there" transportation business at the financial mercy of whoever owns and controls the Moon-sourced fuel supply.

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).

Re:Optimism

[Megane]

Indeed, the only real reason to do LEO refueling is for missions beyond GEO (moon, L4/L5, asteroids, Mars), where you can't just use a bigger dumb booster. GEO requires a really big rocket for a really big satellite, but still well within the capability of current and upcoming heavy launchers. You could potentially refuel existing satellites to give them more station-keeping lifetime, but they won't exactly have a standard fueling port, arbitrarily changing orbits is hard and can use as much fuel as launch (try changing an orbit from equatorial to polar in Kerbal if you want to know how much), and you still can't fix a failed reaction wheel by refueling.

Really, the only reason to need so much fuel would be to move humans around in space. (Life support adds a lot of mass!) So I guess the refueling could support... more refueling workers?