Will of Gnon is that if we act in accordance with his law, we will fill the universe and subdue it.
We plan to relegalize marriage, as marriage was from the Old Testament to 1820, which will result in above replacement fertility, elite fertility, and eugenic fertility, with elite children marrying younger and having more grandchildren. Therefore, colonialism and space.
Musk plans to build many big re-usable rockets. With NASA riding his back, he was in trouble, hence his policy of putting engineerettes on the public face of his space operation. This was, and is, impairing his ability to get actual engineering done. But the space force has lifted the heavy hand of NASA in the most critical area – the range safety officer. As the Star Prophet has said “Failure is an option here. If you are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” The space force range safety officer allows him to fail. Expect more explosions.
To fund his project, Musk is launching the Starlink internet in space. The existing satellites use the K band, which allows a satellite to communicate with earth at twenty gigabits per second.
600 gigabytes per month, average usage 2 megabits per second, top speed 20 gigabits per second. So, a single satellite starts to choke and the internet deteriorates if it is serving a thousand users and they all try to do a ten megabit per second download at the same time, only two of them will succeed. This is very quickly going to become a limit when flying over big cities, and in big cities, SpaceX will be a premium option, where you will pay through the nose and have low monthly bandwidth limits, but get shorter ping times.
Musk is trying to squat on V band, which would give him an additional ten or twenty Gigabits per second, so maybe two thousand users for his future V band capable satellites. Maybe this could be further improved in future satellites by by taking advantage of directionality, but he has not mentioned any plans to accomplish this.
Assume thousand dollars per year per, and most of the satellites are over the sea where they have rather few users, so say twelve thousand satellites, of which only a few thousand are taking care of most of his customers. That works out as a few million customers, a few billion dollars a year, which is lucrative but not a lot to operate a space program. But, if he puts up a lot more satellites, he can serve a lot more customers. The internet in space can provide the necessary demand to launch a very large pile of stuff into space, albeit traffic control in space, avoiding satellites running into each other, it going to become a big problem. Since he wants to build rockets to gain experience in rocketry, more satellites make more sense than fewer but better satellites. Since he wants to settle mars, better to advance the art of heaving stuff into space, than to advance the art of space based internet.
A Starlink satellite presently costs about six hundred thousand dollars to build and launch, which will come down with the BFR, and more experience in building Starlink satellites. A satellite should generate about about a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue a year, at which rate, it barely breaks even. But the cost of satellites should fall considerably over time and the number of users one satellite can support should increase considerably over time.
At around fifty thousand satellites and thirty gigabytes per V band enabled satellite, will likely max out at around forty billion dollars a year, massively dwarfing current space traffic, but still being only a minor part of total internet traffic. But it is enough to keep the BFR project going, a rocket that can take a hundred men to anywhere in the solar system and back.
When traffic problems in space limit how much more stuff can be put in low earth orbit, mining the asteroids for platinum is another potential cash cow. Platinum has many unique properties. It is tough, durable, and like gold, does not corrode. Current platinum demand is nine billion dollars, probably the total value sold would increase if the price came down, and it would build the experience and technology needed for colonies in space to obtain the resources they need. If mining for platinum, why not mine for rocket fuel, at which point our settlements in space become substantially self supporting. Platinum is probably less cash flow than the internet in space, but it is a start on extracting the space resources necessary for a colony to sustain itself in space.
With big re-usable rockets, an affluent person can get to mars on his own dollar. Musk estimates a ticket will cost about $200 000 – which is a lot, but OK for affluent people emigrating.
Why emigrate?
Envious people create trouble and pursue power. They frequently create life threatening problems for affluent people, which during the twentieth century was massively fatal and massively dysgenic. And if above replacement fertility and eugenic fertility, there is going to be trouble. Too many elite children, not enough elite jobs. The elite will want to ship the excess elite off earth. Members of the elite will defect on the elite, stirring up the envy of the masses, and members of the elite will want to get away from those weaponized masses. And the earth will simply get crowded. There is more room, more raw materials, and more energy available in space. Nuclear weapons have been invented, they cannot uninvented, though the US seems to have lost the capability to make them until we restore the civilization that was capable of building them. From time to time, they are going to be used. People are going to want more room between themselves and their neighbors.
With below replacement fertility and dysgenic fertility, there is little pressure to spread out, plenty of vacant room at home, but with elite fertility, we are going to see colonialism come back again. And we are going to run out of colonizable places on Earth very fast, which is going to lead to tension between the Han Hegemony and the Holy American Empire and troubles in the borderlands between them. If you don’t want to get nuked, better turn that tension into a race to grab the boundless resources of space. And if you don’t want to get nuked, best to move your excess elite far away from the borderlands between you and the opposing power.
And now back to the present, the Artemis project, the plan to land a woman on the moon (with a mere man to do the heavy lifting for her). This is a poison pill for Nasa. For a decade, Nasa has been trying, and failing, at enormous expense, to build another shuttle rocket, minus the shuttle and all the reusable parts that gave them so much grief, the SLS. Now they have committed to put a woman on the moon by 2024, launched on a much enlarged shuttle rocket, and landing in a multistage lunar landing rocket similar to the original moon landing rocket, except that all the knowledge, skills, and experience that built the moon landing and takeoff rocket have been lost and has to be reinvented. The organization that was unable to build another copy of their recently existent shuttle launch rocket proposes to build an all new lunar landing rocket by 2024. The teams that are supposedly going to do this are working on the project in a manner that suggests that they expect that nothing will ever actually leave the ground, where, once off the ground, it might cause them embarrassment. As with nuclear weapons, they are working as if no test of what they are working on will ever happen. The price of SLS engines has been escalating in a way that suggests that they cannot actually get them to work and have been throwing ever increasing amounts of money at the problem. They now cost about two hundred times as much per engine as Musk’s BFR engine, have not flown in many years, and I do not expect them ever to fly. The money thrown at NASA to put a woman on the moon by 2024 is going to make them look very bad when Musk lands a major expedition on the moon.
Meanwhile, Musk is building a privately funded rocket designed to carry a hundred people, reach any place in the solar system that man can walk on, fly back to earth, and land. He is testing early and often, failing often, and succeeding often.
Musk’s BFR still has a long way to go, but it, unlike the Artemis project, has already come a long way, while the Artemis project is exactly where it stood when the space shuttle stopped flying and the remnant of the space shuttle was named the SLS. Nasa just changed the name and tacked new objectives on top of the objectives that they had already failed at.
Musk said he hoped to get the BFR flying in 2021, but he has a history of missing such hopes, and it looks like he may miss this one. But he also has a history of eventually hitting his target. If the BFR can get into space and back, and if it can manage in-space refueling, then it can get to anywhere in the solar system, first stop moon. Musk has shown he can get stuff into space, and he has shown he can land a suborbital rocket in one piece. Landing an orbital rocket in one piece is harder, and landing it reliably enough to put people on board is a lot harder, but if he can do that, he can land one hundred men on the moon, or mars, or anywhere in the solar system that man can walk.
But what will they do when they get there? Freeze?
Space mining for platinum and rocket fuel will give us the experience and technological basis for colonies to be self sustaining. You can build almost anything except integrated circuits with a shipping container of numerically controlled tools. Small scale manufacturing is not economically competitive with large scale manufacturing, but it has become considerably easier, cheaper and can build things it formerly could not build. A settlement of several thousand people with mean IQ 120, and a reasonable number of IQ 140 people could be largely self sustaining in space, once we have developed the technology and experience, and the threedee models for the numerically controlled tools to build from. What Ivan the Troll did for guns, we will need to do for everything that a largely self sustaining colony needs.