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ken murphy — (archived)

Well Mark, 2 examples isn't bad, though I disagree with your cavalier dismaissal of both. After all, the example of He3 is largely seen as one of the marginal additional products of soil processing, not the sole reason to do so. And an interesting analogy might be thus:

A boy is looking to get cozy with a girl. There's lots and lots of guys around, but very, very few girls to experiment with. It is going to be very difficult for him to succeed or gain significant experience, especially when some of those other boys are competing for those girls (as there are other industries that can use He3 besides clean fusion). So yeah, it's going to be very difficult for him to make progress. Now, if we could add some more girls to the mix, things start to look better.

For your second example, please don't confuse water with hydrogen. We don't know that there is water at the Lunar poles, though it is "likely", and

Interestingly, while Lunar advocates are able to at least cite examples of specific opportunities, the best we can get from Mars is vague responses like "but I do believe a self supporting Martian colony would eventually find an industry of value to Earth." Care to cite any of those potential industries so that they can be compared with potential industries on the Moon? It is, after all, awfully easy to dismiss specific examples with an "economics of mining and recovering it are likely to be poor" when you don't have anything concrete to compare it with. I.e. Are folks going to be mining and recovering on Mars? Would the economics be less poor? And what specific factors would support that assertion?

To give you some more fodder for dismissal, here are a few of my ideas for Lunar business:

1) Construction firm building solar power towers at the South Lunar pole (impossible on Mars)
2) Servicing operations for Lunar assets (robots, scopes, whatever)
3) Anhydrous glass for optics and construction (impossible on Mars)
4) Vacuum-pure raw material production for the nano-tech industry (impossible on Mars)
5) Transport logistics and freight forwarding services
6) Structural elements for GEO SPSes
7) Solar cells for GEO SPSes
8) Archive of humanity (if there's not one already up there)
9) Unique agricultural products grown in regolith like spices, lunajuana (c) and moonrooms (c)
10) Biohazard research

That's enough for the moment. Now, care to share some of the Martian industries?

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