Why aren't for-profit space expeditions a thing yet...

Why aren't for-profit space expeditions a thing yet? Why is space exploration something only government-funded entities are pursuing?

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Probably to keep humanity enslaved

Wtf i hate Space X now

I don't think we have identified a resource in space yet that would be profitable enough given the expense of finding, mining and shipping back.

Until it gets cheaper to go or we find something, it's tough to get people to invest in the idea of "lets find some magic space gems and ship them back to earth"

Because outside of earth orbit, space is not (yet) profitable.

People are looking to change that though:

planetaryresources.com/#home-asteroids

We'll see if it goes anywhere, but I'm quietly hopeful.

Space is expensive

Space is expensive.

The liabilities for death is, pun somewhat intended, astronomical.

Anything goes wrong, the company that sold the exploration would pay and get bankrupted in the process. 40 million things could go wrong.

Because we don't have a space elevator yet.

They just passed a law saying companies who land on space objects own then. I imagine the technology will surge forward now. If you could land an asteroid of platinum or something...mother of God

>They just passed a law saying companies who land on space objects own then.
And how many nations recognize this law?

>shipping back
Ever hear of gravity?

we don't have the technology yet to make it financially viable. Cure world hunger first.

>I don't think we have identified a resource in space yet that would be profitable enough given the expense of finding, mining and shipping back.

Actually we have. There's asteroids that are easier to reach than the moon that contain, for example, more platinum than has ever been mined on earth.

asterank.com/

and who the fuck is "they"

>stuff in orbit just falls down by itself
baka desu senpai

space.com/18011-super-earth-planet-diamond-world.html

Imagine if someone found something like this in our solar system. There would be a race to develop a method to mine that shit and bring it back.

Because it's literally impossible, NASA is a massive psy-op.

Just looked up the actual bill. It's just the US, only til 2023. Still interesting.

The thing about space travel is that it's out of reach of the long arm of the law.

If someone was to go all out and colonise Mars, plant their flag and declare "this is ours now", what the hell is anyone going to realistically do about it?

I call 55 cancri e

Diamonds are already artificially price-inflated here, that would just make them completely worthless.

I think the main thing is that there is nothing we can get in space that we can't get here, easier and cheaper.

There are still titanic amounts of unmined minerals laying around, waiting to be dug out of mountains. We'll go through a lot more of that before it makes any sense to get it from space.

Because it's all fake.

>that pic
>no sense of scale or distance
>cramped and conflicting composition
>no cast shadow from the machine
My fuckin eyes man.

Because space exploration requires an intense amount of capital and our current monetary system is is built around borrowing and spending, not saving and building up capital to deploy for large scale expenditures like this.

Space exploration might be an area that takes a while to turn a profit and this current economic system of fiat paper currency makes it to where you have to turn a profit sooner or you go bankrupt.

Funny I just realized that if we mined more asteroids we wouldn't even have to "destroy" the earth like environmentalists claim we're doing. You'd think they'd be more supportive of it but they're just anti-technology in general no matter how much they try and hide it.

>space
>profitable
lmao. all space shit is heavily subsidized by the government. even your precious spacex.

Two reasons

1) Getting shit into space is still ridiculously expensive on a dollar per pound scale. We will need a space elevator (materials science pending) or an exospheric aircraft breakthrough to bring the costs down enough

2) There isn't much in space that's both within reach and valuable. Most of what we find in space we can find on earth, only for much much cheaper. Some of the shit we only really find in space we don't really have a use for yet.

Balance both those problems out and then we'll have good reason to start mining in space.

>Cure world hunger first.
What's in it for the world if we cure hunger? More food consumption? More people? Curing hunger isn't financially viable.

What's the end cost of a kilo of that platinum after you account for developing and fabricating all the technologies needed to make it a reality?

I'd bet it's still far cheaper to source platinum from earth.

Gold and other so-called precious metals are ultimately worthless.

The value placed upon these items are artificially inflated by the Jews.

Because goy, we haven't done a complete survey of ayy lmaos we can suck blood from...

You're wrong. Gold is a medium of exchange, a currency, not a commodity as the merchants would have you believe. It it the least degrading metal, which easily melts to be split into many pieces. It functions as another medium of exchange, or currency, as it increases when interest rates decrease and real money supply goes up. Gold is actually more useful than fiat money jewish garbage.

All the metal mined from asteroids would combine and implode the world.

Right now it is still prohibitively expensive, as the technology doesn't exist.

The main obstacle is cost to orbit (as it is in all space flight) as it currently costs about 5-10 thousand dollars per kilogram launched.

They are working on bringing that cost down though. Space-X has now successfully tested their reusable rocket, which should see that price go down massively once it gets going. Other initiatives include Skylon, a single stage or orbit reusable space plane.

These can bring the price down by a factor of 10 or more. It is at this point that serious development in space becomes financially feasible.

>Gold and other so-called precious metals are ultimately worthless.
They're not entirely worthless. Gold has important conductivity and anti-corrosion properties. Platinum is a good catalyst. etc.

But yeah, their current worth is artificially inflated versus their practical uses

My biggest thing is cost. You take an operation such as mineral exploration (which is the very first step in developong a mine, after prospecting) here on earth which costs millions of dollars to do and put that in space I only see that cost rising to ungodly amounts of money. So I don't see how you'd be able to get investors to back you from the get go. Everybody better start producing alot of goods if we do this too, because if nobody is making shit I'm not sure who's going to buy your high grade platinum. Just look how it is now with commodity prices, once China slowed down all commodity prices went to shit and now we're stuck with a surplus of metals, struggling mining companies, and low metal proces. Hopefully, if space mining does become a thing there'll be a shit ton of industries that pop up that can buy the goods we get from space.

it costs too much to send matter into space from the earths surface. we live at the bottom of a gravity well. there is nothing out there worth more than the cost of getting up there to get it. space is for robot probes and satellites, until we can build a generation starship in about 200 years. profit can only exist where there is a localized reversal of entropy (ie earths surface, with sunlight acting as an organizing principle, allowing life to store up carbon).