by myrmidon | 2025-10-28 14:21:08+00:00
# Cost

National budget items have to stand on their own merit. I agree that the US overspends on defense, but "waste" in one place is no justification for "waste" elsewhere. You could apply the exact same argument to bloat any number of budget items in the 10 billion range, e.g. US foreign aid, and for a lot of those the humanitarian utility (and possibly even purely financial ROI) is much easier to argue than for a space program, too.

# Feasibility

The problem with any kind of space industry or self sustaining settlement is that you have to get all things there, first. How we build things currently is simply not amenable for remote bootstrapping, at all, even disregarding the fact that many critical industrial inputs easily available on earth are just... not... in space. Contrast this with biological life, which is much better at this aspects by relying on small, self-replicating building blocks for everything.

Self-sufficient colonies are currently completely out of reach. The same applies to space mining, indirectly. For those to be a credible next step, we would need to have some baseline industry already established, that would e.g. be capable of growing tens of tons of food (or refine tens of tons of aluminum per year) as a fundamental input. That is an unskippable step on the path to self-sufficiency, and an incredibly early one, too. But not only do we not have that right now, there are not even fleshed out concepts (much less projects) in the pipeline for this currently.

I confidently claim competitive mining (or independent settlements) are impossible in the next decades even with the full defense budget because there are too many intermediate steps missing that all the money in the world can not conjure up (=> see paragraph above for examples).

Cheaper launch costs or 3D printers change absolutely nothing; the problem with doing anything in space is that it costs you more than its own weight in fuel (in practice: many multiples) to get anything there, and I see no realistic paths to get "overhead costs" (separate from fuel) lower than for, say, air travel.

If you had to build a self-sufficient industry on earth that would already be incredibly challenging for any non-trivial industrial output (just think: how large is the total footprint of every industry involved in building you keyboard alone, or phone? sure there is some potential for consolidation but MUCH less than you would like without changing everything fundamentally).

If you had to pay for every single ton of material/personnel to be flown like 5 times around the full equator just to get there, it would be impossible to achieve self-sufficient industry economically, even on earth, in atmosphere, with human workforce and finetuned processes and a lot of other helpful inputs we won't have in space, and this calculus is unlikely to change anytime soon.

# Effectiveness

Even at best, say you have massive space mining industry and self-sufficient cities on Mars by the end of the century (again: this is a complete pipedream): What does that actually change? What does it get us? Basically nothing. We have a ton of problems, but doubling the available iron, aluminium, or electric energy is not gonna solve any of those. If ressource allocation is fundamentally broken, multiplying the input side simply won't help at all.

As far as mitigating extinction threats goes: Thats nice to have, but almost worthless, and you won't have any real benefit until the space colonies are fully self-sufficient. With worthless I mean: given some very conservative assumption (an asteroid impact killing every single human every 50M years, $20M per statistical human life), the "extinction insurance" would be $100M per year for the US-- not enough to pay for anything in space, really.

# Sidenote

Did not want to derail this into a fusion energy discussion, but Helion marketing is most obviously going to give the earliest timeline imaginable because the want investment dollars.

Consider critically: How far away are they from a design that can be built industrially/economically? Has to be several generations/iterations of prototype plants (this is very obvious from what they have right now). If you compare their past timelines with the present, you will find that they were ridiculously overoptimistic and they are far from finished, this is gonna get progressively worse. Technical feasibility is one thing, but economics are hard if you have to compete with panels of refined sand that harvests kilowatts of direct electrical power in a few square metres and costs less than a window of the same size...