Starfactories and Gigafactories Will Make Mars Profitable

12 thoughts on “Starfactories and Gigafactories Will Make Mars Profitable”

1. Interesting. I mean there’s a certain appeal to being one of only 10 or 10000 people on a planet. You kinda get that in the wilderness.. “we’re the only people here”… it’d be an adventure for sure. And yeah, some people would get addicted to it and stay if they could.

   I’d like to see some Optimi unload a starship and lay down some solar panels here once. I’d like to see a boring company Prufrock be set loose to dig a 2km circular tunnel and have it build a gravitrain on earth first. I’d like to see some Optimi set up some gizmo to create quantities of fuel and water from Earth regolith (in the Atacama?) before I believe they can do it on Mars.

   I’d also like to see Musk at least try to be nice to Kamala. Yes there’s always going to be some friction between .gov and .com but he’s not helping the situation.

   Yadda yadda. The idea that there won’t be taxes or zoning on Mars is bs tho. Beyond the completely subsidized first builds, anyone who wants to do anything will need ‘infrastructure’. Infrastructure, like highways, is stuff that benefits more than one end user. As soon as someone has an idea, they’re going to be like, ‘lets get the big guy to pay for some of this’. And the big guy is going to be like, well, ok we’ll help because this other group could benefit from it too. And new guy will be like, can we have some air to breathe over here? And another guy will be like, “can we have some water over here”, so well call it paying for utilities or paying taxes or whatever. There will be some form of that. And zoning.. unless you are spacex, or really build your own spaceships and stuff, you are going to have to ask permission to do lay some solar panels over there next to the sand dune.. The big guy may say no..

2. Speaking of Asteroid mining….what if Earth pays 2K per ounce for gold/platinum from said asteroid but the “bank of mars” of the Martian free states pays only 1.6K? With one important caveat…the mars government(s) doesn’t collect taxe,s while on earth you would be lucky to net 50% of your gross product. Think 2000 X .5m= 1000/oz vs 1600/oz on mars. Furthermore what if said Martian government’s “Mars bucks” are a gold/platinum based currency? So their value would increase relative to deficit spending dollars on Earth?

3. Orbital security services.
   Space commando units for hire.
   Detailed space survey maps in dynamic format out to the belt.
   Intelligence overwatch of cis-lunar space from deeper space.
   Integrated Earth-Luna-Mars communication and transportation network.

4. Probably at least as interesting -and a bit more relevant- about how a Mars society could be self-sustaining with what ratio of humans-to-robots, how to mobilize and set-up such a society at the 10-person size to the 100- to the 1000-, etc., how to sustain it before humans actually arrive, what decisions to make about using the local materials vs imports, etc. The total ‘Mars From Day 0’ Itinerary. (By the way, has anyone seen a teslaBot walk on sand – perhaps a Mars equipment ‘food for thought’)

5. I can’t off hand think of any ordinary physical goods Mars could export to Earth at a profit, given shipping costs.

   Not unless Mars develops special expertise in semiconductor manufacture, or production of expensive drugs. Hm, maybe valuable isotopes, on account of having a population that’s not pathologically averse to nuclear energy?

   Just mass producing ordinary goods can be done more cheaply on Earth.

   It’s possible cultural evolution on Mars might result in very valuable IP goods, that cost near zero to “ship”, but that wouldn’t be a fast development.

   But plenty of places on Earth manage to have healthy economies while producing nothing but valuable experiences. So long as Mars actually attracts a significant number of people, it can be economically viable, and once it’s self-sufficient, it doesn’t need to have trade with Earth.

   • It may not be so much that Mars itself offers unique or ubiquitous opportunity but all the things that happen before and around Mars, such as the likelihood of opening up the asteroid belt and other NEOs to exploitation. Creating a new colony tends to open up supply lines and demands that necessarily encourage far-outreaching resource exploration, unforeseen technological industries, and academic interests, which may need a space navy, which may need yards and outposts and depots. Once there has been a few decades with various trips outward of a few months, the entire Space Industry likely becomes it’s own self-perpetuating entity.

   • There is a suggestion Robert Zubrin made in “The Case For Mars”.
     He noted
     1) that the formation of most concentrated ore bodies for many elements on Earth required liquid water dissolving & repositing the elements.
     2) that Mars is the only other body in the solar system that has had such a water cycle.
     3) that humanity has been finding & mining all the best ore bodies on Earth for thousands of years, but any such ore bodies on Mars are unexploited.
     So *MAYBE* mining Martian minerals for export could be profitable.

6. In order for Starships to return to Earth, methane and oxygen will have to be produced on Mars.

   So the most obvious first export from Mars would be methane and oxygen. I.e. Starship can be filled with enough propellant to not only get from Mars surface back to Earth geo-transfer orbit (with aerobraking), but also enough propellant to transfer to a new Starship that has carried ~20T of cargo and crew to GTO in a single launch, so the latter can launch onward to Mars. (Someone check my math on this, but the fuel/delta-V numbers seemed to work out.)

   This is a massive savings versus a bunch of tanker launches from Earth, which creates a profitable market. Sure, it’s a bit self-referential – you have to be sending Starships to Mars to create the market and to carry the fuel back. But if you’re going to be sending Starships anyhow, it’s still real. (One big problem is the large amount of energy production required on Mars to make this work – around double of simply sending a Starship back to Earth.)

   Longer term, if oxygen can be produced on Phobos, only the methane would need to be launched from Mars surface (assuming that can’t be made on Phobos as well). That might enable shipping enough propellant back toward Earth to cover missions to the moon as well as Mars. Maybe eventually nitrogen and carbon can also be shipped to support a larger moon colony.

7. This has to be one of the most non-sensical posts I’ve seen here.

   The only profitable export I can imagine may be from mining but I suspect this is also a long shot. Billionaire tourism? A microscopic dot compared to the earth’s economy.

8. With 4 million Starlink customers and growing, Musk has shown he can invest in the long term, waiting for an eventual ROI way longer what most entrepreneurs can.

   So now I believe what he said: they will use that Starlink revenue to fund the Mars missions and the start of the Mars city, sustaining it with NASA funding levels of money or more (with or without NASA’s involvement) and this for several years before having any financial breakeven.

   The most generous philatropic donation ever. But he doesn’t want it to remain being charity, ofc. People and governments will indeed pay to go and will also pay with their time and dedication.

9. Sorry Brian, what would Mars be able to export the Earth? The US was able to export commodities to pay for the imports needed to develop.

   Compute services? Difficult to get high bitrate, leaving aside the latency.

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