SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

I think, a few more bets in the projects like - https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/projects/next-generat... - may have a chance of yielding solutions. But it is not going to happen by itself.

And orbital infrastructure... Sounds impractical. Even if somehow possible, it'd be risky to have a dependency on such infrastructure. Fragile and susceptible to so many risks.

> It explains why thousands of films, just like 'Parasite' and 'Money Heist' flop, why they are not on Netflix or in theatres, and why you've never heard of them

That's true in America as well. There's only so many good movies!

> Quebec consumes it's own content because they are a distinct from the rest of North America, and they invest a lot in culture.

And they buy it, they don't need a government check to make it.

> but then when I try to restate your argument

The argument, nothing more, nothing less:

> One can project from SpaceX's launch history that as the commercialization of space intensifies, this figure is going to continue to grow exponentially

I have made further arguments, but this is the one that is downvoted. I imagine most of the people that downvoted were Elon stans, but what's funny is that I doubt Elon himself would disagree with this statement. He has made exactly this kind of superlinear growth with Tesla, his battery production, and I'm certain he has the same ambition for SpaceX.

> You seem to be arguing that space flight will continue to grow exponentially, consuming all the resources required to sustain that growth, unless we stop it right now, or very soon, unless we stop it right now, or very soon

Once again, I have never made this point. I am in sympathy with directing attention and capital to problems with earth, but I reserve that as my opinion and beyond this discussion.

Allow me to restate my claim so that we're both certain:

The estimate that capital expenditure for SpaceX's space projects is 2 billion per year is short-sighted, and maybe a little disingenuous, given that that figure will grow exponentially in the longer term.

It's this exponential growth we're arguing about, whether it will be 'eventually drawing from other, more worthy projects' is a morality question I did not pose. Agreed?

> It is limited by the available resources

Err, yes. I'm not saying growth goes forever, obviously, but by the time the space industry (on earth) saturates, spending on space will be many orders of magnitude more. Let alone that acquisition of raw materials and manufacturing for space can continue off earth, so I don't think depletion of resources are a problem in the very long term.

> but why not consider processor transistor density?

Because it's completely orthogonal to my point. I'm not talking about efficiencies, I'm talking about gross spending on the technology. Full stop.

> we don't seem to be increasing our spending on it

But we will be increasing this spending year-on-year, likely at an exponential rate. You disagree with this, but it seems we're both speculating. Though for at least my speculation, the current trend, and history, broadly agrees.

> I think that looking at the profitability of use cases of space flight really only strengthens my argument, and weakens the one I think you're making.

The one I wasn't making. But I'm not sure about the argument you're making? If SpaceX is making exponentially more profit, capital expenditure on commercial space ventures must be increasing. If there's more profit, it's because someone, somewhere, is fronting up the cash.

Could this money be better allocated in order to solve Earth's problems? Probably. Might space tech in some way help Earth anyway? Maybe. But will the spending for a new frontier of wealth increase exponentially in the medium to long term? Barring some major catastrophe or extinction event, it's inevitable.

They can be made as sturdy and secure as your budget and desire extends. These things would be designed from the ground up to have additional atlas piller supports for redundancy in case a ring gets damaged with many different power supplies to guarantee that the active support system continues to operate.

Remember that you do not need to move all of this mass off anywhere once in place so you build it like a building, not a ship that needs to be optimised for low mass and acceleration.

You do not build these flimsy since even the modest ones will have a big upfront cost and the better equipped one is, the bigger the payoff. They are incredibly easy to extend and maintain once the initial ring is set into place though since they are in orbit so as long as you match its own orbital plane, you can operate on it just fine.

You will have a big superstructure magnetically suspended around the moving ring rotating in the opposite direction to the inner ring at the speed of the earth's own rotation so it stays stationary relative to the ground, and which is both half the reason why we build these things but also makes it significantly difficult to penetrate that inner ring.

That superstructure is going to be much heavier than the inner ring by necessity since that inner ring is moving faster than orbital speeds to counteract the momentum generated by the superstructure. So you might as well use that mass for useful things.

We should also not think of active support structures as somehow less sturdy than passive ones. In fact they are far more sturdy since they can be used to create arbitrarily high levels of compressive strength - whatever level of juice you are willing to expend - and this is where those fusion reactors would indeed come in handy. You would also in reality use multiple inner rings instead of just one though one would be fine too for an initial construction.

Keep in mind though that even considering conventional power sources and no superconductors, these things can regenerate a decent fraction of that expended energy back by using the moving ferromagnetic matter inside to generate electricity through the induction generated by either orbiting along the earth or in the case of the atlas piller, falling all the way down from the mesosphere or even further if you decide that it's worth your investment to extend one all the way to geostationary ala the classic space elevator.

Might be a bit overkill though since the orbital ring itself can easily launch you at decent speeds for cislunar and even interplanetary travel.

You also probably have a shit tonne of solar panels on the superstructure itself and would probably want to add a fission or fusion reactor too for added redundancy since you always want multiple power sources for very large structures.

Either that or we continue to rely on rockets which cannot be scaled up to the point where off world travel is as common as air travel without bringing ecological ruin and gargantuan amounts of noise pollution. It's just about the only real curse of being on a planet that has both a thick atmosphere relative to most rocky planets (in our solar system) and also being the massive of the rocky planets.

Global lipstick market is 13 billion USD today and wish forecasted to grow to 20 billion in 2027.