On 3/8/2021 6:02 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Mon, 8 Mar 2021, John Dom wrote:
At the time this came up as a thread, all on this list voted against the orbital gravity ... concept during period 2011-2013.
Uh, nobody ever said it was a bad idea -- only that it was harder than it looked, and there were valid reasons why existing stations hadn't done it.
As for this one, to quote O.A.'s management: "...we're definitely looking in the tens of billions of dollars for the full construction... And I'll just leave it there, because it's still a bit speculative at this point." Tens of billions, for *markets* that are mostly still speculative? Good luck on the fundraising for that.
Note that "tens of billions" is not the big issue. Private investments on that scale get made with some frequency... for projects whose technical uncertainty, market uncertainty, and regulatory uncertainty closely approach zero. That's what it takes to attract investors who see your dream purely as a money-multiplying machine, and don't care whether the product is space hotels or spiced sausages.
For projects like this one, in which all three uncertainties loom large, you need investors who are buying into a dream... but they don't generally have that kind of money. Need some much-cheaper intermediate steps first.
Henry