Space Freighters and the East India Company

A recent article compared Elon Musk’s SpaceX with the East India Company, suggesting it had similar influence to the company that ended up ruling the whole Indian sub-continent.

I think that’s going a bit far. Yes, SpaceX has a dominant position in the launch market, but that is very different from control over continent level resources.

The high valuation of the SpaceX Initial Public Offering (IPO) is hard to justify from revenue from launch and even the Starlink constellation. There seems inherent assumption of additional sources of income that could come from low cost launch services with talk of colonies on Mars.

However, are planets the best destination for creating a space economy? Could there be space freighters heading out to Jupiter and its moons, as in the photo above? Ok, in this case it’s a BA flight heading for Heathrow, not a spacecraft, but you get the idea!

An interesting post on LinkedIn suggested that moons and asteroids are better bet, as their resources are easily accessible, transferable to other locations due to the low gravity well.

I think there’s something in that. We think of living on planets as the best form of living in space, but is that because we do live on a planet?

One of the topics of Noctilucents, starting with the second book, Selenium, is what is a right solution for building a space economy….