Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics"
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Exploration is not commercially viable at this point. No material is valuable enough to make the trip up and down the gravity well worthwhile. There's a reason that the only thing we trade with space is modulated photons.
On the other hand, there's still a market for station-keeping fuel in Geostationary orbit. Back when it cost $10k to move a pound of goods to GEO, the market value for station-keeping and end-of-life graveyard boosting fuel was $3B-$4B a year.
It's entirely possible that within 10 years or so, we could research a way to get fuel out of asteroids. $3B-$4B a year would be a healthy market to pursue.
Unfortunately for that business model, now that Elon Musk has entered the market, the cost is down to something like $800 / lb to GEO. This drops the max revenue from $3B-$4B to $300M - $400M or less, which is unlikely to be enough to capture, return, and deliver fuel from asteroids to every satellite in GEO.
If instead of modulated photons we wanted to deal in bulk photons (Space Solar Power), that might be possible, and might even be profitable if the power satellite floated from one time zone / market to another, delivering power at peak prices. Rectenna farms for receiving power are currently prohibitively large and expensive, though.
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