Infected Toe Blues and Space Condos

I stayed home again and used another vacation day after calling out sick Friday. My swollen foot is much better than it was on Friday. Doctor Tam (yes, Dr. Tam) prescribed a third antibiotic and the infected toe is almost clear now, I think. I need to get my ass moving and go to my appointment with Dr. Hopkins, who wasn’t available Friday. I don’t think it will be okay for him to cut the tendon today, I probably will have to see him again next week… 8-(

(Dr. Hopkins did cut the tendon and I'm going back to work tomorrow morning)

I need a few more words and I was trying to estimate our future spaceborne population again. Assuming they’re doing work based on the value of a seat to orbit vs. their orbital production. The problem is, this changes over time, based on space flight costs and where. Farther out, and the cost to get a worker there and support them will go up, while costs to get to LEO and beyond will go down over time. For now this is still tens of millions, so the value of production will have to be more than that or no production, no job and no ride; ‘No bucks, no Buck Rogers!’

LEO will do for now, but LEO won’t really get going without lunar Oxygen and then metals; oxidizer is the lion’s share of propellant, 78% of Methalox at the preferred ratio. We might just export hydrogen peroxide to get enough oxygen with a little hydrogen in LEO, and bring up carbon from Earth to LEO. This comes to 16.5% Carbon, 5.5% H2 and 78% O2 by mass. Eighty-five percent H2O2 would be 6.67% H2 and 93.33% O2 by mass and 5.5 tonnes of H2 to 77 tonnes of O2, so we can make this work just by tweaking the concentration. This points out, again, that things change and we can improve over time; O2, then water or H2O2, then make methane and refined materials and finally manufactured goods. O2 is a vast improvement, we will always want water as well, etc.

What I expect is that the cost of production will go down over time, in materials, labor and maintenance. Labor costs will be based on what it costs to support because that will affect what an enterprise can afford to spend on everything, including labor and labor will be a reasonably static proportion of on orbit production costs. We don’t know what the ‘efficiency’ growth rate might be, but wages will be based on that and the cost of living, which will be very high to begin with.

John Barnes used power production as his baseline, that a solar powersat provides employment for so many people and the powersats increase in number while decreasing the number of workers needed over time. The population also diversifies into other economic niches, and all this provided a pull for emigration to space. If we assume that very soon cheap access to space provides a way to cut setup and production costs to $10 million per space worker and LEO production is 1% of the $⅓ trillion space economy, that’s $3.3 billion or 333 people working in space. We can grow the spaceborne economy very fast, at 8% per year while finding ways to decrease the number of people we need on orbit at half that rate, so that the number still increases over time while the value of that labor and therefore pay increases until eventually a space worker can actually afford to own a habitat, or a space condo. Assuming this sort of growth for three quarters of a century is a little depressing, about six thousand working in orbit for a trillion dollar industry, but those space workers will be making millions even if they get less than 1% of the value of that. Actually, they will be splitting with dirtside support workers, but the high end would be a million dollars (“One. Million. Dollars!”). A little depressing, a lot slower than I’d like, but a trillion dollar spaceborne industry and billions to spend on habitats is something we might see by the 22nd Century. A stern chase is a long ass chase but at some point the spaceborne will eventually eclipse the rest of the human enterprise. There are stories to be written in there...