Economics (was Critical time)

> In a message dated Mon, 9 Apr 2001 6:02:42 PM Eastern Daylight
Time, john_schlick@... writes:
>
> <<
> >>> Is there any historical precedent for large scale commercial
> cooperation.......
> ============================
>
> The Petroleum industry.
>
> The Gulf States in the middle East is a hive of avtivity, mostly
contractors from every developed country on the planet. All working
collaboratively to
> get the job done.

Yes; but that is to service a preexisting market in which a very
large proportion of the western population drives an engine powered
by gasoline... i can assure you that the petroleum industry wasn't
created from scratch using gigabuck private investment (gasoline was
originally just a by product of heating oil drilling). Same is true
of the egs chosen previously; with the very disturbing exception of
Iridium & its space telephony colleagues, all of whom assembled vast
multinational consortia to create large scale space businesses... &
dropped every cent they spent. Designing plausible space business
models isn't a case of deciding what you'd like to build & then work
out how to sell it... it's finding out what the market wants & then
deciding how best to service it.

If that market is meant to be consumerist, i can see no feasible
mechanism whereby large scale space development can take place in
either the near or medium term... that means you need to convince
multinational groupings - individual nations won't cut it, no matter
how big they are - that this is worth doing. Public service reasoning
- the powersat angle, say - is interesting; but it runs up against
some surprising barriers.

To begin with, we definitely need better electricity storage
technology to replace the gasoline driven infernal combustion engine
with mass electric transportation; & until we cross over to that
point - or the price of petrol in key markets (particularly
USAmerica) is held at true cost rather than artificially deflated for
political gain - the market for large numbers of expensive powersats
(& for cost effectivity we WILL need a large number of these units)
will be nonexistant... most of the current power shortages in some
parts of the western world are due to inefficient use of power rather
than real shortage, after all.

It will always be cheaper to use Earth generated power more
efficiently than to create space based power; so until you're running
all cars on safe hydrogen cells....

Robert.