Yes my friend, I am a space farmer. I grow zero-gravity crystals, harvest helium-3 from the moon's surface, and extract drinking water from asteroids, all for the benefit of mankind. I am a space farmer.
China and India are anticipating the move to the new green power, which is nuclear.
Accordingly, China is moving to increase its electrical power production by nine times its current capacity and India ten times. By 2020 the two of them could consume over half the uranium mined globally last year, which was a little over 50 tons.
SpaceX’s bid to serve as the Iridium Next launch agent was cheaper than the Indians and the Chinese.
How low is it? Shockingly low.
So will SpaceX make up in volume what they’re losing in per unit sales?
SpaceX obviously has to first have a successful product before they can start taking government customers away from the big dogs. If tradition is followed, they can then start amortizing more of their start-up costs by billing to the government.
They’re on their way. However, like Sea Launch, could their margins be so slim that one failure puts them on an unrecoverable path?
At some point the buyer has to be saying ‘this deal is too good to be true.’ However, both the satellite manufacturing deal and the launch services support the hypothesis that there is a global capacity glut for goods and services and that in effect, it should be a buyer’s market for some time.
So how does one make their money? By having the U.S. government as a major customer.
What a great irony that SpaceX, the anthesis of the Titan program is using the Titan launch complex/space launch complex at CCAFS and Vandenberg.
