Even things like electricity and water, which move pretty well, have "place value" -- people commonly move water from place to place by growing grain with the water and then moving the grain (not the water) to places that don't have enough water to grow the grain conveniently / economically. The same goes for electricity -- Iceland exports refined metals which require huge amounts of electricity to melt, effectively exporting the electricity entombed in the refined aluminum.
What can be made in space that can allow moving this abundant energy? Obviously you can't haul ore up into space then refine it with a big magnifying glass and drop it back onto the earth. People talk about asteroids but they seem like they're a big delta-V away from where they'd be useful to put into Kia bumpers.
I think bottom line is that resource utilization from space on earth makes zero sense. Space resources utilized in space makes perfect sense but there’s the chicken and egg problem. Bezos focus on space colonies fits this agenda. Musk mars colonization focus does as well due to mars low gravity.
Imagine a really large lifting body, made of interlocked containers, building a honeycomb-like superstructure. Put some ablation layers around it. Maybe some small remote controlled rockets for steering. Let it glide down into the ocean near the coasts. Pull it into the the harbour via tug-boat. Remove remaining ablation layers. Disassemble honeycombed superstructure. Open containers. Get packets out. Melt containers into something else, or put them back up via space elevator, or whatever.
For the most part I believe you're correct, but certain goods do have a sufficiently high value density that space manufacturing might make sense, especially in cases (like I highlighted above) that benefit specifically from microgravity. What will probably make more sense is taking advantage of microgravity for research, then adapting what we learn to manufacturing planetside.
There's probably a whole world of manufacturing processes that benefit from low gravity. The only one currently used is making high-quality optical fiber: producing ZBLAN fibers in 0g fixes a lot of problems with bubbles and crystal formation, allowing you to make better and much longer fibers. As access to space continues to get cheaper we will probably discover a lot of other cases where 0g is beneficial for manufacturing, and entombing energy might be another way to make those economically interesting.
Moon bricks. Ship regolith and dust into orbit from the moon, mix with water to make a moldable clay, form into bricks, bake inside the mother of all solar kilns and then drop them down on Earth. The water should be recoverable if the kiln is air tight. This would greatly reduce fuel needed on earth for construction. You could even make the reentry vehicle out of baked clay, only parachutes would need to be added. Extra points if you can make the whole thing buoyant and land them in the ocean.
George Crabtree et al from Argonne national lab are working on an automated chemistry lab that synthesizes and tests various flow battery chemicals on its own. Of course simulation and AI are used too but it's not enough. There are a lot of alternatives and a lot of different requirements / dimensions.
Very fascinating video: https://youtu.be/yv_8xfwsKxE?t=1208
If you need extensive industrial infrastructure in orbit, maybe make that from resources mined from asteroids. Ship high value finished goods down from orbit.
How much of that high value stuff will wind up in satellites? Cut the trip down the gravity well and just build in orbit, especially low value items that are expensive to launch but cheap to make.
Any use of energy in space is going to have pretty big cooling problems unless it's a fundamentally "hot" process that radiates away heat easily. Because any usage of energy in space all becomes heat.
Solvable with a large enough thermal mass. And once we're able to start mining the moon or asteroids for mass to be cheap enough, heat would no longer be a problem in space: use conduction and convection to move heat away quickly, have a holding area for hot matter for radiative cooling to do its thing, then keep adding additional mass until equilibrium temperature of the system is below requirements
> have a holding area for hot matter for radiative cooling to do its thing
The implication of course is that surface area can be increased trivially by adding matter. And with a larger thermal mass, more energy will be required to heat the system to the same temperature, giving more slack in the system for radiative cooling to work.
So largely I believe the plan is to use microwaves to send the power back to earth so you don't have to have anything processed in space. This would usually involve ground stations that would receive the power.
Right -- microwaving the ground is just moving the energy, which may or may not actually be efficient. On the face of it it seems silly, but so does making a rocket out of water towers and landing it on it's ass on the moon, so I've re-calibrated 'silly'.
Nevertheless -- finding ways to move refined products around that embody a huge amount of energy is the traditional way to approach this problem.
And anti-matter, if you could package it, is an obvious example....
The book Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez is my only source, but, the efficiency of rectenna is discussed there, and particularly, though the efficiency of the transmission is somewhat low, the efficiency of solar panels in space is MUCH higher than on earth, and they can operate 24/7, so the overall system efficiency is still substantially higher than the equivalent solar panels on earth... at least, assuming you can build the solar panels in space from mined material as they do in the book, I imagine if you needed to launch all the material from earth, it would probably be a fairly different story, assuming you included that in the calculations.
> the efficiency of solar panels in space is MUCH higher than on earth
Not really. The biggest difference between a panel on Earth and one in space is the space panel is illuminated 23 hours a day. So per panel you're getting 2-3x the illumination over the course of the day.
The drawback is even at the absolute cheapest pie in the sky Musk estimates of cost to orbit ($10/kg), a space solar panel is orders of magnitude more expensive than a ground panel. You could just deploy 3x the number of panels on Earth for 3x the price vs deploying in space at x\^3 the price.
Even with the near constant illumination of panels in space the losses from RF conversion, free space losses, atmospheric losses, and RF rectification eliminate a lot of your power gains. For those losses you also incur significant costs. So SBS is kind of a lose-lose problem. Every technology that would make SBS more practical could be applied on the ground for a tiny fraction of the cost.
>The biggest difference between a panel on Earth and one in space is the space panel is illuminated 23 hours a day
Small nitpick, but as a GEO satellite navigator I want to point out that the solar panels are in sunlight constantly except for "eclipse season" around the equinoxes. During eclipse season it can be in shadow for about an hour.
Only if ignoring all externalities. If the panels could be manufactured in space, or on the moon, via some ultrasmall in-situ-utilizer bootstrap gizmothingy, which would then use material from the moon, or asteroids, we'd save much mining and manufacturing here on earth. Which has its own costs. As we all should know, meanwhile?
Yeah with space it is typically more efficient to move energy versus mass. The efficiency may not be great but you get to balance it with the increased efficiency of solar panels being located in space. So independent component efficiencies might be overshadowed by large end to end system efficiency gains.
It’s not efficient for replacing power sources on the ground, but for airplanes, ships, and remote communities it could be genius. No need to carry heavy batteries around and your capacity is virtually unlimited (At least as far as it is feasible to build a massive orbital solar array).
Why isn't it efficient for replacing ground based power sources? In the case of replacing ground based solar, it means not having to deal with intermittency and diplacement of natural habitats. In the case of hydrocarbon-based power plants, it means not having to contend with pollution.
What can be made in space that can allow moving this abundant energy? Obviously you can't haul ore up into space then refine it with a big magnifying glass and drop it back onto the earth. People talk about asteroids but they seem like they're a big delta-V away from where they'd be useful to put into Kia bumpers.