RE: RE: starship-design: YES, we might do it.

["Walker, Chris" <Chris.Walker@BSKYB.COM>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	David Levine [SMTP:david@playlink.com]
> Sent:	Thursday, October 15, 1998 3:45 PM
> To:	'starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu'
> Subject:	RE: RE: starship-design: YES, we might do it.
> 
> Well, its interests are likely to be financial.  If a space tourism
> company winds up with increasing demand, first for on-orbit facilities,
> and then for lunar facilities, they may find developing space-based
> mining (or other industries) economical.  Then, when someone else comes
> along and wants to build, say, an intra-solar-system vehicle
> construction yard, the tourism company may find it in its economic
> interest to sell the products of their mines to this company.
> 
> I'm not saying this is what will happen - just showing one possibility.
> 
I am hoping this is what will happen. I think it's a reasonable possibility;
I just wanted to point out that industry in space may still not give us the
investment we wanted for insterstellar travel.

	Granted, if you were this tourism company, you might not help other
	tourism companies, but why not?  If you don't sell to them, they'll
get
	their resources from Earth anyway, like you did originally.  So sell
to
	them at a high enough cost to make a tidy profit but a low enough
cost
	to keep them from buying from Earth.  There are current industries
on
	Earth where competitors sell each other products.

Agree. But will a tourism company sell enough of its product (ore) to our
starship company for us to build an interstellar craft? I don't know how
much material this endeavour is meant to require.