Hacker News

points by etiennebausson 2 days ago | 0 comments

I disagree.

Commercial manufacturing in space can be economically viable, as long as most of the components do not come from Earth.

If you build titanium stations in space, but all your titanium come from the moon, the price structure is wildly different. The price of shipping material is the price of building a railgun on the moon.

Absolutely not cheap,but the operating cost afterward is very low. And since the moon is geolocked, you can target any lagrange point with very good precision.

There will still be a need for components coming from earth, but the moon should be able to send all the material for structural parts (titanium), and also solar panels.

[–] rbanffy 2 days ago

> The price of shipping material is the price of building a railgun on the moon.

This would be very unfortunate. Luckily, we only need to build the rail gun (and the mining/refining facilities) once. After that, the cost is marginal.

[–] Yizahi 1 day ago

I wouldn't call a maintenance and ops for a large energy intensive Lunar structure "marginal". The dust is going to be a major pain permanently. Powering the system will be a pain, cooling both railgun and power generation for it will be an incredible feat of engineering. And that's just the initial hurdles of what I suspect would be a thick book list just the problems.

PS: I would also leave it to everyone to evaluate how many seconds would this railgun keep existing until the other superpower will blow it up to pieces, "just in case". Question works the same for any owner and any opponent pairing.

[–] rbanffy 1 day ago

The blowing up part is very valid - humanity will need to grow up before we can make such a thing, but the rest stays - once it’s built, we only need to maintain it, and we can design for low maintenance.