Comments by "Rob Fraser" (@krashd) on "Heavy Industry In Space - A Great Idea Or A Pipe Dream? | Answers With Joe" video.

  1. You are a Joe virgin? how is that possible? We thought we had converted the entire world to Joe's teachings!
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  2. More than 90% of the 'shit' in orbit is found at a very specific altitude, if you build your industries at a different altitude you will be fine. The ISS is below this altitude, it costs NASA and their partners a fortune in fuel to keep boosting the station any time it is in danger of falling into the atmosphere but that cost is much cheaper than taking the risk of placing the station a thousand miles higher where it could be in the danger zone of impacts. Now any sort of industry would likely be magnitudes larger than the ISS so they would have to exist much much higher than where the ISS currently is so you would have the ISS below the debris fields but the factories above the debris fields.
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  3. At the rate that people like Bezos and Musk are accruing wealth they will both be trillionaires within 25 years, Bezos is already worth more than 100 billion and Musk is estimated to have over 250 billion in assets. These guys will be the Weylands and Yutanis of the real world. That is enough capital to overcome the initial hurdles of expense. In fact it surprises me that both of them, and the Chinese, are setting goals such as "go back to the moon" or "be the first to put a person on Mars" because if I had their technology and wealth my goal would be to mine an asteroid. Some of the asteroids drifting around the Sun hold more precious metals in their small mass than the entirety of the Earth, harvesting that would be a literal gold mine.
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