some musings on this- there's essentially three classes of activity I see this facilitating, in roughly chronological order: existing stuff, novel space stuff, and stuff we transfer from earth
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RT @mattparlmer
This is a must read, reposting for the evening crowd
I kinda thought people had grokked this already, I guess not
Starship means open season on offworld hardware, launch costs are now drastically lower and a much wider set o…
https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1453953615949811719
existing space stuff is things like telcom and remote sensing. This is getting commodified fast, but as launch costs continue to fall, it's going to open up new opportunities- either for very niche sensors/payloads or trying to use new capabilities to displace somone like Planet
novel space stuff would be something like in-space manufacturing of exotic materials, or semi-routine orbital tourism. There's probably more opportunities here than we realize, but that's unknown-unknown until people start to experiment
the last one is potentially the most interesting, because that's where you're taking things that could be done on earth and starting to do them in orbit instead
I used to think this was a really, really long way off, but now I'm not so sure
there is a tipping point in launch-cost and throughput where building a gigawatt of solar power is cheaper and faster than going through the process of building it on Earth
space engineering is hard, but so is governance, and cheap launch lets you swap a coordination problem for an engineering one
your competitive edge is regulatory bypass. with some exceptions (like the Moon, which is both a clear coordination point and culturally significant, or LEO, which becomes congested) I expect a lot of activity in space to remain relatively less-regulated than Earth