Space as a Platform
Space Manufacturing, Space Internet, and Space Energy that will create the infrastructure necessary to support interstellar life.
I. The Entrepreneurs
Musk and Bezos are both interested in building our way into space, but take very different approaches. While the former is focused on getting us off-planet, the latter thinks the one we’re on works just fine. Said more simply, Musk and SpaceX want to go to Mars, while Bezos and Blue Origin want to build infrastructure around earth.
There are other entrepreneurs getting their start in space: from mining asteroids, taking pictures from orbit and the moon, or 3D printing in space.
Whether you’re one of the big boys or a smaller startup, most of these entrepreneurs are attempting to create a business model to help fund the ultimate visions because space is prohibitively expensive. A $1 million seed round barely buys you a square foot of “space” on a launch vehicle these days. So, entrepreneurs are forced to come up with another method, such as:
- Tourism: rich people pay for the experience to either achieve weightlessness at the edge of space (move over Dorothy, this ain’t the Wizard’s hot air balloon ride)
- Launches: get commercial contracts to send payloads up to space (e.g., satellites) for private industry or the federal government (SpaceX closed a NASA deal due to their reliability and cheap cost)
- Data: either getting photos on demand of specific areas of the world, or tracking the number of cars in parking lots to predict revenue growth rates for hedge fund investment managers
But these things are just the first step and, frankly, don’t get us the infrastructure needed to start moving more of our world into extraterrestrial space. That’s where the next space platforms come into play.
II. Space Mining & Manufacturing
Jeff Bezos mentioned at the 2016 Recode conference that building things in space makes a lot more sense than trying to build them on Earth. Namely, that heavy industrial manufacturing should happen in outer space and the Earth should be zoned for residential living. He wants thousands of entrepreneurs building things in space and is investing in heavy infrastructure to make that happen (i.e., rockets). But what I believe needs to happen before that is obtaining the raw materials needed to manufacture things.
The early market leader for that is Planetary Resources. They’re working on ways to mine raw materials and yes, even water, from asteroids in our solar system.
The system for extracting water from asteroids is fairly ingenious. You wrap an asteroid entirely by a machine that heats it up using solar power. Once the water trapped on the surface of the asteroid melts (it’s really cold in space), you capture the vapor and store it as liquid H2O.
While the technology and engineering methods already exist for reaching asteroids and extracting water, the real problem is detection. How do we know which asteroids contain the most water that can be extracted most efficiently? That’s a problem that could be solved by someone sitting in their basement doing a bit of research and mathematics.
The other aspect that makes Space Mining so attractive is the existence of heavy or rare metals. In fact, most of these metals extracted from mines on earth were actually deposited here by asteroids. One metal-rich asteroid could produce more Platinum than has been recovered in the history of mining on earth. You could do the same with some of the most common metals used on earth to support almost all industrial manufacturing, in order of commonality:
- Iron: the most commonly used metal in the world, it’s found in the earth’s crust and the human body. It’s used to make Steel, which is important for building strong structures and perfect for a manufacturing operation in space when we begin building more space stations or the first colonies on the Moon and Mars.
- Aluminum: also very common, it has a low density and is resistent to corrosion. It’s used for household items like alumnimum cans and aluminum foil, and for cars and trucks. Again, this is necessary in space for building transportation vehicles and storing our food that we grow from water extracted from asteroids.
- Copper: it’s ductile and easy to work with, transferring heat and electrical current. Thus, it’s important for electrical wiring and piping, making it a necessary requirement to sustaining life in space.
- Titanium: we call this a space-age metal for a reason. It’s just as light and as corrosive resistant as aluminum, but is stronger than steel. As such, it’s used in spacecraft and airplanes. The problem is it’s difficult and expensive to mine on earth so it’s not as available as the metals above. If we can find asteroids loaded with Titanium, we’ll be in business.
- Zinc: even though it’s hard and brittle it has two great uses. One is galvanizing Iron and Steel. The other, more importantly, is it’s used in batteries along with lead, for storing energy.
- Other: Tesla’s electric car batteries are made of Nickel, Cobalt, and Aluminum. But the grid product that will handle energy storage for homes and businesses will use Nickel, Manganese, and Cobalt Oxide Cathode. We need to find a way to not just capture energy (solar panels), but also store it (electric batteries).
So, what we’ve found is that we’re going to need to mine and extract a variety of metals from our solar system’s asteroid belt. But, the very next problem that must be solved for manufacturing these metals into something usable is a Space Smelting process (e.g., transforming Steel into Iron). But because we’re in a zero gravity and ultra-clean environment, we are going to need new materials processing and manufacturing techniques.
Some of the benefits and challenges include:
- Making perfect spheres of liquid is simple, but pushing liquid through a tube is harder.
- Zero gravity means we can make larger crystal structures and because it’s ultra-clean, you could theoretically 3D print defect-free objects layer by layer.
- Temperatures can go from boiling in direct sunlight to absolute zero in the shade, but that can be used to our advantage when making stronger materials (e.g., heat the metal in a sword, bend it over on itself, hammer it, then cool it and repeat).
- As much of this manufacturing needs to be done outside of a human environment in the vacuum of space, it requires the use of artificially intelligent robotics to grab, manipulate, and perform complex tasks on our behalf.
In space manufacturing, we can no longer think in terms of assembly lines, but rather in a single AI robot assembling single materials and parts, then shipping these to the next assembly plant.
This is just a very high level overview of what would be required to create a space mining and manufacturing operation. Clearly, each aspect of this requires more requirements until we reach a satisfactory level of detail. That will take time and, again, enterprising entrepreneurs.
III. Space Internet
About year ago in mid 2015, SpaceX announced that they were working on a way to deliver high speed internet from a collection of satellites orbiting the globe. Another startup with Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) on the Board, called OneWeb, is pushing forward to launch hundreds of satellites into low-earth orbit that can beam down internet to the entire global population.
SpaceX hasn’t mentioned much since then but there have been reports that they’ve hired an A-Team from Broadcom to help build out the software, chips and hardware required for these satellites to work.
However, Elon was recently recorded at the opening of a satellite facility in Seattle saying, “The focus is going to be on creating a global communication system. In the long-term, it will be like rebuilding the internet in space.” Apparently, the founder of OneWeb also worked at SpaceX so this truly is a head-to-head competition, but SpaceX has the cheapest rockets for launching satellites into space so OneWeb may need to use SpaceX and be dead before it starts.
Finally, Facebook is throwing its hat into the ring building drones with frickin internet laser beams attached to its head, using deep learning models to predict where humans will be in emerging markets. All in the guise of getting every living human as an active user of Facebook.
There are 3 problems that must be solved before we can get to Space Internet:
- Price: 60% of people in the world don’t have access to the internet (mostly in 3rd world countries) so the data service has to be cheaper and better than the current cellular network for people to switch or pay for it. And launching things into space is anything but cheap.
- Speed: The satellites need to be 36,000 kilometers above the earth so it’s still going to require time for data to be beamed from orbit to your iPhone. Fiber back-haul costs about $5,000 per mile, but this fiber is what connects the cell tower to the connected internet so the speed problem may be solveable.
- Manufacturing & Orbit: Each micro-satellite will still weigh 300 pounds and have to be manufactured (OneWeb is working with Airbus). Launching satellites into orbit is prohibitively expensive (tens of milliosn of dollars) so OneWeb is trying to reduce prices by 90%. Obviously SpaceX is working on one-launch-per-month capabilities to reduce launch prices as low as possible.
But what if you could use Space Mining & Manufacturing to build the satellites in space instead of launching them there in the first place? Remember, the rule of technological adoption by humans is that the newest innovation always hit a ceiling of the innovation that must come before it. In this case, maybe the Space Mining & Manufacturing part of the infrastructure must be in place before we move on to the next innovation of Space Internet.
If you’re interested in digging in deeper from a product development perspective, there’s a great Wikipedia page on SpaceX and OneWeb’s Satellite Development.
IV. Space Energy
As Elon often says, there’s a giant fusion reactor in the sky (i.e., our sun). So, why aren’t we harnessing that energy. In a previous letter, we broke down the efficiency of solar panels as they exist today. We’re able to capture about 1/4th of the energy. I incorrectly posited that nature must be more efficient, but a reader pointed out that it’s actually more like 3% so we’re already doing better than Gaia.
But we need to do better. If we want to ascend as a species and begin traveling between star systems, we’re going to need to not just collect solar energy efficiently, we’re going to need to harness the full power of our sun.
There’s an old theoretical machine posited back in the 60s called a Dyson Sphere. It came from science fiction, but so did Dick Tracey’s phone watch.
Isn’t it interesting how the proposed Dyson Sphere of collectors in the image above looks remarkably similar to Space Internet? I have a feeling that part of the technology used to create synced satellites in synchronous orbit could be leveraged to also position collectors around the outside of the sun.
This is likely the most far-fetched of the processes required, but no matter what our approach is (a 3D sphere of collectors around the sun, a single band of collectors orbiting, or just an array of collectors closer to our manufacturing operations), we will be relying on solar energy to power our mining and manufacturing operations.
But we have to get the first machines into space in order to begin the solar energy collection process that will then power the rest of the internet, mining, and manufacturing process. So, will we be shipping fossil fuels into space in order for us to build these solar arrays? I think we need to look no further than the construction of the space station for the answer to that.
But I’m hopeful that one day, we will find a way to harness the full amount of the energy of the sun so that it is no longer lost to the cold blackness of space.
V. Bonus: Interstellar Communication
Space Internet and radio signals will only take us so far. At some point, when it takes months, years, or even decades to send a message to an interstellar explorer, it stops being practical to send one at all. And so, we must find a new way to communicate.
I’ve always felt the answer lies somewhere in quantum entanglement. It’s not about sending a message. Rather, it’s about connecting two particles together so the message just is. Basically, it’s like holding your hand up to a mirror. One particle is your hand. The other particle is your reflection. When you move your hand, the hand in the reflection also moves in exactly the same way. You could say that these two things are “entangled”.
It’s not a perfect anology so it’s a bit dangerous. But conceptually when you separate those two things over galaxy distances, then change one particle, the other mimics it exactly. So you don’t actually send a text message. It just exists on your friends phone at the exact same time as you create it on your phone. There is no delay. No lag. It just is.
You can read a bit more about that in a post where I show how you can simulate a quantum computer in your web browser.
— Sean
