--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781786632623" library_document_id: "6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea" source_sha256: "1abf214ba80dbc1c2c27dfbaa4c324d483354085cfb676f2df827d68fa33ed6f" pdf_physical_page_count: 288 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 130 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea?start=130&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=130&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=120&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=140&limit=10" --- # Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=130 | PRINTED_PAGE=121 Since then SpaceX has gone from strength to strength, achieving a litany of firsts. In 2008 it successfully launched the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket into orbit – the stuf of science fiction only a decade earlier. In 2015, its Falcon 9 booster auto-piloted its return to Earth after launch, something without precedent for an orbit-capable rocket. That breakthrough was particularly important as many believe that reuseable first stage rockets will significantly lower the cost of sending a payload into space. A viable private market in ofworld transport was ready to arrive. Since then a glut of newcomers have emerged in the quest to push prices for space transport lower still. While they lack the means to conduct manned missions of their own, by providing cheap, weekly launch opportunities for low-Earth orbit, they will enter the slipstream of larger companies like SpaceX, Boeing and Jef Bezos’s Blue Origin. One such company is Rocket Lab. Founded in New Zealand in 2009, it was the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to send a booster rocket into space. Now based in the United States, its stated mission is to remove the barriers to mass space commerce by providing frequent, low-cost launch opportunities on its Electron booster rocket. While bigger players have their eyes fixed on manned missions to other planets, the fact that smaller outfits are capable of innovating in this area – albeit exclusively with smaller payloads – is remarkable. As the sector grows it will be companies like Rocket Lab that become the backbone of an incipient industry. Mining the Sky 121 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=131 | PRINTED_PAGE=122 Falling Costs, Rising Ambitions Winning the race to land on the Moon didn’t come cheap. In today’s prices the Saturn V’s thirteen launches cost \$47 billion over a decade – meaning each cost more than \$3.5 billion. Launching twice yearly at its peak, the Apollo program came in at around \$150 billion dollars accounting for inflation. After Apollo, in order to reduce overheads and enable launches with greater frequency, NASA pursued the Space Shuttle program. Yet even that cost the US taxpayer half a billion dollars per launch, with the system enjoying no more than five flights a year at its peak. Since 2000 and the arrival of a private space industry, however, costs have fallen precipitously. Today a Falcon 9 rocket (much smaller than the Saturn V) costs SpaceX around \$61 million to launch, while the larger Falcon Heavy is less than \$100 million. Nevertheless, even those figures mean many companies and individuals stand little chance of reaching space, and even if they have the means to do so, there is currently a two-year waiting list for launch. That could all change with Rocket Lab’s commitment to launching every week on a projected cost of as little as \$4.9 million per flight. That is only possible because of its uniquely eficient method of building and launching rockets: using the same amount of jet fuel a plane would need to go from LA to San Francisco, the Electron can put a payload into space. The rocket’s secret is its Rutherford engine, which takes many of the design innovations first applied by SpaceX further and deploying them on a smaller scale. Perhaps most remarkably, the Rutherford has an entirely electric propulsion cycle, using electric motors to drive its turbo pumps. In addition, it is the first oxygen-hydrocarbon engine to use 3-D printing for all primary components, allowing complex but lightweight structures unattainable through traditional techniques. As a result the company has not only reduced costs but decreased build time from months to days. 122 n e w t r av e l l e r s ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=132 | PRINTED_PAGE=123 All of this also allows rapid scalability. As the company’s CEO Peter Beck puts it, ‘The vehicle was designed from the outset to be mass produced … [we have a] 3-D-printed engine – with six printers [we] can produce one in twenty-four hours. So to scale up there we just buy more printers. The whole launch vehicle has been engineered and designed around manufacturability.’ Because its key technologies – from its high-performance electric motors and lithium-polymer batteries, to the 3-D printers used in construction – are on the same experience curve as the technologies outlined in the last chapter, these rockets will, like so much else, only get cheaper from here. Rocket Lab isn’t the only new player eager to use 3-D printing to reduce overheads in a still prohibitively expensive business. Relativity Space – like SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California – wants to reduce the cost of a rocket launch from the \$60 million mark to a fraction of that by simplifying production and all but removing human labour from building rockets, something which still accounts for as much as 90 per cent of overall cost. The company’s 3-D printers, with their eighteen-foot robotic arms, are among the largest ever built. Equipped with lasers that can melt a steady stream of aluminium wire into liquid metal ready for shaping, they represent a qualitative leap in the tools available to medium-sized businesses. The company’s founders claim that by mid-2020 a handful of such arms will be able to build the entire body of a rocket, measuring ninety feet tall, seven feet wide and capable of carrying 2,000 pounds into orbit. They anticipate that construction time will take less than a month – and all for a booster which, while comparatively small, will be larger than SpaceX’s original Falcon 1 rocket launched in 2008. Mining the Sky 123 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=133 | PRINTED_PAGE=124 While the company aims to make its Terran 1 rocket operational by 2021, so far the printers have only produced a seven foot wide, fourteen foot tall fuel tank, which took several days, and an engine, which took a week and a half. Even if progress is slower than envisaged, which is likely, the design approach represents a paradigm shift. While NASA’s space shuttle had 2.5 million moving parts, and SpaceX machines possess around 100,000, Relativity Space want their rockets to have a thousand moving parts or less – fewer than most cars. What is more, rather than having globalised supply chains they foresee the entire rocket being built in the United States. Such an approach will almost certainly be industry standard in the near future. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket has hundreds of parts which are 3-D printed, a figure that is constantly rising. This is leading to rapidly falling costs for potential newcomers, especially those looking to quickly prototype and iterate their designs. As Bob Richards from Moon Express said in August 2017, ‘our first quotes from an unnamed aerospace company for our propulsion system in 2010 was \$24 million in twenty-four months. We ’re now printing our engines for \$2,000 in two weeks. All of which means that by the mid-2020s we can expect incredibly cheap, constantly improving rockets taking light payloads into space for a range of organisations. While the vast majority of their cargo will be ultra-small satellites, some will be exploratory landers capable of returning to Earth. Although progress will be intermittent, these trends will underpin the emergence of an industry set to define the twenty-first century: of-world mining. 124 n e w t r av e l l e r s ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=134 | PRINTED_PAGE=125 Moon Express In late 2017 Moon Express outlined their ambition to build a lunar base on the south pole of the Moon within three years. They will start by deploying a number of robotic explorers, ranging from their small MX1 to the larger MX9. All of these explorers will be powered by the ‘eco-friendly’ PECO engine, whose fuel will be drawn from basic elements found across the solar system – hydrogen and oxygen. This is critical because the greatest obstacle to a viable space industry is refuelling of planet. The PECO engine, and others like it, will need to operate in space with fuel produced wherever they find themselves. The ambition is for these autonomous, unmanned vehicles to be deployed as either landers or orbiters. The MX9 is intended to deliver an MX1 to the Moon’s surface, where it will make and then use fuel from lunar ice in order to return to Earth. That said, the name Moon Express shouldn’t mislead you about the scope of the company’s ambitions. While their initial target is the Earth’s only natural satellite, the broader objective is to establish a self-sustaining architecture that can be used to prospect every planet, moon and asteroid in the solar system for resources. Naturally these primarily include minerals but, given the PECO engine will run on oxygen and hydrogen, ice as well. While mining metals like cobalt or platinum is the primary aim, the company also wants to transform the Moon, Mars – and anywhere else with substantial deposits of frozen water – into giant gas stations. While the premise for most science fiction is that our descendants travel among the stars because of a desire to explore, to go where others have never been, the impulse driving all of this is far from altruistic. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ‘Global Exploration Strategy’ (GES) published in 2007, months before the first rumbles of the global financial crisis, by NASA and thirteen other space agencies. Detailed inside is the framework determining coordination among the most powerful countries in the world, establishing the basis for private enterprise to make profits in space in the not-toodistant future. Mining the Sky 125 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=135 | PRINTED_PAGE=126 A decade later many of the document’s presumptions are already apparent. It notes how space exploration ‘ofers significant entrepreneurial opportunities by creating a demand for new technologies and services … space-based resource extraction and processing’. It even ventures into specifics, adding, ‘Moon rocks are rich in oxygen that might be exploited to provide life support systems for lunar operations. Liquid oxygen can also be used as a rocket propellant – and it might be more economical to manufacture it in space than to lift it of the Earth.’ In 2009 Nasa confirmed large quantities of water on the Moon, with the likes of Moon Express referring to the compound as ‘the oil of our solar system’. The framework proceeds to explicitly state how international cooperation in space will be undertaken to facilitate, rather than compete with, private interests: ‘For business to be confident about investing, it needs the certainty of a long-term commitment to space exploration, the opportunity to introduce its ideas into government thinking, and the rule of law. This means common understanding on such dificult issues as property rights and technology transfer.’ In short, the GES showed how nation-states will agree on the rules for a new space race – one in which companies, rather than countries, will compete, and where the world’s elite become even wealthier. 126 n e w t r av e l l e r s ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=136 | PRINTED_PAGE=127 The Province of All Mankind But where technology and market ideology is willing, the law may prove somewhat more dificult. The Outer Space Treaty, written in 1967 and ratified by over one hundred countries including the United States, remains the international standard for what humanity is permitted to do beyond the confines of Earth. That treaty specifically states that space is the ‘province of all mankind’, with countries unable to engage in ‘national appropriation’ or sovereignty over the Moon or other celestial bodies ‘by occupation or by other means’. That said, the treaty is a document of its time. Given it was forged in an era when only states had the capacity to engage in space exploration, and superpowers at that, it does not mention the rights and responsibilities of private business. Because there is no explicit prohibition preventing corporations from building or staking claims, mining in space could fall under legal parameters similar to those reserved for fishing in international waters. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Naveen Jain, co-founder of Moon Express, is optimistic on the legal issue, noting in 2011 how there ‘is strong legal precedent and consensus of “finders keepers” for resources that are liberated through private investment, and the same will be true on the Moon’. There is of course one problem with Mr Jain’s thinking: ‘private investment’ is not responsible for our present level of technology, be it rockets, robotics, 3-D printing or other technologies critical to space exploration. Even now the most innovative private actor in the industry, SpaceX, remains dependent on NASA contracts to fund its research and development. What Jain wants, as we see repeatedly with the powerful, is to socialise the losses of publicly funded research and privatise the gains. Mining the Sky 127 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=137 | PRINTED_PAGE=128 Even the wording ‘liberated through private investment’ grates, as if millionaires piggy-backing publicly funded research were acting for the greater good. Yet that is in keeping with market fundamentalism and, as Marx writes, the likes of Jain have viewed the bounty of nature as somehow the result of capitalism for centuries: Natural elements entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing … do not enter as components of capital, but as a free gift of Nature to capital, that is, as a free gift of Nature ’s productive power to labour, which, however, appears as the productiveness of capital, as all other productivity does under the capitalist mode of production. To repurpose the phrase from capitalist realism: is it easier to imagine the end of the world than public ownership of the immense wealth beyond it? Why should it be? For the first sixty years of space exploration, every significant breakthrough was achieved by nation-states. From von Braun’s V2 rockets to the USSR’s Sputnik and NASA’s iconic Apollo missions, private investment had no influence in any of these technological developments. As a result, there is an overwhelming case for space to indeed be the province of all. The technologies which are set to bring its abundance within reach were funded by ordinary people – not wealthy investors. Of course, that hasn’t stopped certain countries trying to help domestic business interests at the expense of others. In 2015 Barack Obama legislated for American companies to engage in profitable of-world resource extraction for the first time – as long as those businesses are majority owned by US nationals. For now NASA formally maintains a neutral position on the matter, but the underlying reality is quickly changing. 128 n e w t r av e l l e r s ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=138 | PRINTED_PAGE=129 That was clearly expressed in a sub-committee meeting for the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation convened in May 2017. Titled ‘Reopening the American Frontier: Exploring How the Outer Space Treaty Will Impact American Commerce and Settlement in Space ’, its intended purpose was to test the limits of the Outer Space Treaty and maximise opportunities for private enterprise. Most indicative of this thinking was a speech given by Scott Pace, the executive director of the US National Space Council, towards the end of that year: It bears repeating: Outer space is not a ‘global commons,’ not the ‘common heritage of mankind,’ not ‘res communis,’ nor is it a public good … these concepts are not part of the Outer Space Treaty, and the United States has consistently taken the position that these ideas do not describe the legal status of outer space. These are the words of people and institutions now gearing up for the major economic scramble of the coming century: who owns the resources and wealth of outer space. The United States is far from acting uniquely in this respect. By January 2017 Luxembourg had already begun to create the legal frameworks for asteroid mining companies to base themselves in the Duchy, an ofer quickly taken up by Planetary Resources – a company looking to establish itself as a key player in the industry. This flurry of rhetoric, lobbying and legal activity should be expected. After all, we stand on the brink of a paradigm shift in resources. Some see that as a route to fantastic personal wealth. As Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources put it, ‘I believe the first trillionaires will be made in space and the resources that we ’re talking about are multitrillion-dollar assets. Mining the Sky 129 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=139 | PRINTED_PAGE=130 Beyond the Limits of the Earth The existence of asteroids was confirmed at the dawn of the nineteenth century when, in 1801, the minor planet Ceres was observed for the first time. Scientists would soon come to distinguish asteroids from meteorites, the former having a diameter greater than one metre, the latter less than one metre. With comets, the diference is qualitative: while asteroids mainly consist of mineral and rock, they are composed of dust and ice. Like the planets, asteroids orbit the sun, although few of them are purely spherical. The ones that are, such as Ceres, are often referred to as ‘dwarf planets’ as they are so large that their own gravitational mass has compressed them into a sphere. More generous estimates believe there may be 200 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt of the outer solar system, as well as more than a million asteroids larger than a kilometre in diameter. In terms of medium-term prospecting, however, there is a more interesting group of objects that reside far closer to home. At present we know of more than 16,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) ranging in size from one metre to more than thirty-two kilometres. The number of NEAs more than a kilometre in diameter is estimated to be around 1,000, while the number of NEAs wider than 140 metres is around 8,000. Upper estimates speculate there are more than 1 million NEAs measuring forty metres in diameter or less, of which around 1 per cent have been discovered. Whether it’s Moon Express prospecting the Earth’s only moon before moving on, or Planetary Resources sizing up NEAs, the potential abundance of of-world mineral wealth almost escapes comprehension. One estimate claims that a platinum-rich asteroid measuring 500 metres wide could contain nearly 175 times the annual global output of the metal, 1.5 times known world reserves. Even a smaller asteroid measuring the size of a football field could contain as much as \$50 billion worth of platinum. 130 n e w t r av e l l e r s 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=140&limit=10)