What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

Courtesy NASA

Gold coins? Platinum pellets? Grains of cobalt? I predict water will be the preferred currency in outer space. You can drink it, bathe in it, breathe it (oxygen), burn it in rocket engines (oxygen and hydrogen), grow things (hydroponics), and protect yourself from radiation. 

Water is easily stored, shaped, and divided up for transactions. It can be flash frozen and quickly thawed with the deep cold of space and the intense radiation of the Sun.

Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags 

The current method of water storage in space looks like duffel bags with a spout as this picture reveals. This astronaut is obviously reveling in the fortune of water surrounding him. That water is worth $83,400 per gallon based on the current cost of $10,000 to put a pound of something into orbit. Hopefully, it is Evian or Fuji.

Water storage aboard ISS - Courtesy NASA

Or one could build a palace of ice in outer space. There is that much water available on some asteroids. Just make sure the seal between the ice and the airlock stays frozen solid. 

Small entrepreneurs will make their first fortunes by seeking out chunks of ice in the asteroid belt or simply mining close-flying asteroids for the liquid gold. Planetary Resources, an actual asteroid mining company, has recently stated that it will concentrate on water instead of precious metals as its first acquisition. 

Water globule floating on ISS - courtesy NASA

The companies that first acquire water in space will be like the merchants that made fortunes selling picks and shovels to the forty-niners in the California gold rush. 

The importance and value of water will demand that water recycling and reclamation units aboard space vehicles and habitats be ubiquitous and efficient. Even if someone dies in space, the water in their body will be reclaimed before burial in space or transportation back to Earth. This will be part of a signed agreement when someone goes to work in space. Their immediate kin will get some portion of the value of that water in space, even if they are on Earth. 

Saving the world one bag at a time. Recycling genius.  

Security will be a concern as well. When a worker’s contract ends, what’s to keep him from filling flexible bags of water and hiding them about his body and carry-all? When he gets back to the orbiting end of the Lunar Space Elevator or a space station near Earth, he turns his water in for some Earth-based currency like gold or platinum before going back to the planet. 

The biggest non-recoverable expenditure of water in space will be for rocket fuel. The biggest recoverable use for water in space will likely be radiation shielding. It is efficient over a spectrum of radiation including cosmic and gamma rays. In fact, radiation shielding may be designed to not only protect against radiation but to be a reserve source of fuel as well. 

It is possible a water-based currency, both physical and digital, will be established in a space-based culture of dozens of companies and thousands of workers. Since water melts so readily, the gold coins, platinum pellets, or grains of cobalt mentioned before might actually be used; and they will represent some predetermined amount of water. That amount will most likely be decided by some committee with all of the space-based companies represented. The value of water will fluctuate as discoveries are made on asteroids being mined and unrecoverable expenditures of water such as rocket fuel are used up. There may one day be a cryptocurrency based on water - H20coin, of course. 

The actual water will be kept in some safe place, a giant chunk of ice hidden, or well-guarded, or both. As a matter of course, owners of large quantities of water in space will, at some point, have that water melted and mixed with some small amount of radioactive isotope to “brand” it. It won't be enough to affect health, but it will be easy to track if it is stolen. 

There is probably more water in asteroids than on Earth. Its value in space comes from the difficulty and expense of finding and securing it. Those who do this first will be the future lords and princes of outer space. They will control the lifeblood of space.

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Tesla Roadster in space - courtesy wikipedia

We won't be hauling it down with a Tesla Roadster.

An asteroid one kilometer in diameter is parked at the Lagrange point L5 of the Earth/Moon gravitational system. The asteroid orbits the Earth at the same distance as the Moon - 238,900 miles. If a line were drawing through the center of the Earth to the Moon and the center of Earth to the asteroid there would be about a 45 degree angle between those lines. It is in a safe, stable orbit that does not require regular expenditures of fuel to keep it there. This safe, stable location was the deal between the United Nations and the company retrieving the giant space rock; actually more metal than rock. 16217 Ryugu contains iron, nickel, cobalt, water, nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia. 

Plastic bags are made from ethane, a part of natural gas burned as waste before they started making plastic bags. 

Outer space construction has not yet hit its stride so some cheap way is needed to get these metals to the surface of Earth where they can be sold. Here is how it could be done. 

If chunks of metal were cut off of Ryugu and simply dropped to Earth, it would be a mess. Chunks big enough not to vaporize completely upon reentry could do major damage. The velocity when it reached Earth would be nearly 200,000 miles per hour and create an explosion equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT. So, for practicality, we need to get this stuff closer to Earth and reduce that velocity. 

Flaming mass making reentry - courtesy Neil Bleving

A deal is brokered between the powers that be on Earth and the asteroid mining company so that a million ton chunk of iron can be brought into a medium Earth orbit about 2,000 miles up with careful planning and monitoring. Along with it comes several space tugs and lots of water (from the asteroid) as fuel (electrolysis - oxygen, hydrogen) to keep it in orbit. Engines are anchored to the big asteroid chunk and will automatically kick in to prevent a deterioration in orbit. 

Any amount of heat one requires in outer space is available. One simply needs the right size mirror configured to apply that heat to an appropriately sized area on command. With this heat the stoney portions of an asteroid and, perhaps, lunar regolith can be melted and turned into ceramic. Metals can be melted down by these same mirrors. 

Concentrating mirrors cut off a 300 ton chunk of iron and begin to melt it down. 

Concurrently, stoney portions of the asteroid are melted to form ceramic. While the ceramic is molten, pre-heated (to prevent explosive expansion) nitrogen is introduced into the ceramic melt to produce a foamed ceramic material. This material will be formed into the shape of a lifting body similar to that of the Space Shuttle but about half the size.  As the hot nitrogen entrained in the ceramic cools it forms a partial vacuum, making the material much less conductive to heat. 

It takes 7 trucks to move the same number of paper bags as one truck moving plastic bags. 

The blob of iron melt is rammed into the ceramic mold. High temperature spargers inserted through the wall of the mold inject the iron with nitrogen as well, making a foamed metal having one tenth the weight of iron while still retaining much of its strength.

Once out of the mold, a foamed-ceramic mat is attached to the bottom of the foamed metal lifting body. and a steering module is inserted into the cavity molded in the rear to accept it. This is a heat-resistant rudder and elevators on vertical and horizontal stabilizers controlled by an onboard GPS and autopilot. Built in space with only the electronics and motor coming from Earth, those parts are used again while the rest is recycled. 

A railgun is built on the mass of the asteroid chunk and points at a tangent point to Earth about 100 miles above the surface. The lifting body is attached through grooves molded into it and launched towards Earth at 20,000 miles per hour retrograde to orbital velocity. When the lifting body reaches the upper atmosphere, it is going much slower in relation to the Earth, allowing a safe, guided landing on a shallow lake where it is recovered. 

The bubbled metal might be worth many times its solid value, making the whole operation profitable. Many types of metallurgy may be possible in a vacuum and weightlessness that aren’t feasible on Earth. We could be talking about metals such as high temperature inconels that are very expensive. I designed a coil in a furnace, the prototype for making BPA free plastic bottles, where a 6 inch schedule 40 (1/4” thick wall) piece of pipe cost $1200 per linear foot. 

For smaller packages of very valuable metals like platinum or palladium, NASA may have just the thing. They have developed a folding heat shield. A small reentry vessel with a hundred pounds of palladium has a heat shield that folds out to a much larger size than the vessel itself, creating a shield off of which most of the frictional heat is sloughed away around the side of the vessel on its reentry path to an elevation and speed at which it can deploy a parachute. Be there to pick it up before someone else gets it because that's 1.6 million dollars we're talking about. 

courtesy NASA

These are the possibilities once we start thinking about how to maximize the payback for such a massive undertaking as capturing an asteroid. Of course, the real payoff for the asteroid miner will be when construction off world begins, increasing the value of their asteroid many times. Unexpected returns will be the technological advances necessary to get this done that will eventually work their way into our everyday lives. 

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Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

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Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Bryan Versteeg / Spacehabs.com

In 2011 German designer Markus Kayser built a machine called a Solar Sinter. It concentrates sunlight via a 3 foot by 5 foot fresnel lens onto a box containing sand. The box moves a layer of sand in programmed patterns, allowing the 1600 degree Celsius beam to melt the sand in a controlled design. Once that pattern, or layer, is complete, another layer of sand is added and the process is repeated until a 3D object is created from fused sand.

A very similar machine could 3D print objects in orbit around the Earth or Moon or anywhere in space sufficient sunlight can be collected to melt stuff. It would have to be highly modified over Mr. Kayser’s design. For one thing, you don’t have the convenience of gravity holding down your bed of sand. Another thing … you don’t have sand. 

Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career. 

The fresnel lens will have to be replaced with mirrors simply because mirrors are cheaper, more rugged, and more flexible. The bed of the printer will have to be inside a centrifuge affair producing artificial gravity. Envision a large cylinder 80 feet in diameter and 300 feet long. It spins around its long axis. The printer head can travel the length of the cylinder or in a circular path inside the cylinder, or a flat path on a chord of some arc of the cylinder that is still far enough from the central axis of the cylinder to have enough “gravity” for the system to work. Flexible light pipes will take the sunlight collected by the mirrors at the center of one end of the cylinder and feed it to the printer head. A lens at the printer head will further control the acuity of the beam that hits the medium to be melted. 

Ideally, the centrifuge portion would be attached to an asteroid placed in orbit at one of the Lagrange points L4 or L5 in the Earth-Moon gravity system. That would simplify spinning it without the worry of compensating for precession like a top or anything else that spins. It would be attached to the relatively massive asteroid with brackets that extend to the ends of the cylinder where bearings and electric motors provide smooth, stable rotation with a minimum of fuss and bother. The asteroid is acting like a good work bench, providing stabilizing mass to carry out projects in space. 

If a suitable mass isn't available, the cylinder would simply be set spinning by tangential thrusters with any precession also controlled by swiveling thrusters at each end of the cylinder. 

Centrifugal 3D printer attached to asteroid. Drawing by Glen Hendrix.
Click to Enlarge

If we’re not talking about sand as a printing medium, what are we talking about? There are really only two practical sources for meltable medium to be used in our 3D printer. One is lunar regolith and the other is ground up asteroid. The asteroid option is cheaper if you discount the getting it there part. Lunar regolith would have to be transported from the Moon’s surface. Asteroid material is already in orbit. So far, two good reasons asteroid mining will complement our travel to space and our ability to stay there for any length of time. 

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how. 

The disadvantages of using asteroid material are that it has to be excavated from the asteroid, sorted by material, and milled into a powder. This will call for the invention of robotic excavators that drill into the asteroid much as tunnel borers do their job on Earth. One of the first jobs to be done in mining an asteroid will be to make safe, comfortable housing for personnel during the project. The asteroid excavator can hollow out tunnels which will be outfitted for habitation safe from any stray cosmic rays. 

Asteroid mining - courtesy NASA

The Moon’s regolith, on the other hand, is already a fine powder. So fine, it was a problem on the lunar landing missions. It is also fairly uniform in composition. Although it would have to be transported from the surface of the Moon, the one sixth Earth gravity should make that a cheaper solution than bringing material from Earth, especially if water can be found on the Moon in sufficient quantity for use as fuel. A lot of regolith can be hauled into orbit for the cost of moving an asteroid. 

3D printed Lunar base - courtesy European Space Agency

Let’s say we use another, more traditional method of 3D printing whereby a small, sticky glob of substance is deposited out of a nozzle and the nozzle moves on. Mixing our asteroid or lunar powder with water and some other adhering substance to hold everything together gives us a paste to use similar to what concrete printers use now, perhaps thicker to cut down on explosive evaporation of the paste as it comes out of the printer nozzle.

Imagine a large steel plate as the print bed. It could be a light gauge steel sheet with stiffeners on the bottom. Without gravity and its attendant forces, the print bed is just a place holder and starting point. The printing side is coated with Teflon for easy removal of the printed object. The edges of the plate are rounded to fit pulleys. Four pulleys with bearings, two on each side of the print bed and aligned with each other, roll continuously along the edges of the printer bed in the plus or minus “x” direction. From the centers of these pulleys extend upwards four shafts in the “y” axis direction. These shafts go through a stabilizer frame that holds everything together. This whole stabilizer frame moves in the plus or minus “y” direction. Mounted through this stabilizer frame is another shaft with the printer head and motor to drive that head in the plus or minus “z” direction.  A large tank for mixing, storage, and pumping floats around, making sure there is no binding or interference with the umbilical delivering print medium to the printer head. 

Free-floating 3D printer. Printing volume about 300' x 60' x 15'. Drawing by Glen Hendrix
Click to Enlarge.

This type of printer might be good for producing parts for habitats in orbit or insulating cladding for equipment or personnel tunnels in an asteroid. The cold of space will seep into the deepest parts of an asteroid and must be dealt with. 

Whether we bring an asteroid into Earth’s orbit or not, I predict 3D printing of large objects in space will become a reality. It may or may not look and work like what I’ve described here, but they will be an integral part of a robotic fabrication milieu in outer space. Human workers will be at a premium. Machines will have to fill the gap. 

The human race is on a course of infinite growth in a finite environment. The push into an infinite environment with infinite space, materials, and energy is inevitable and desirable if a global catastrophe is to be avoided. The sooner we start, the better chance we have of surviving our immature macro-societal tendencies. 

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Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

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Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

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China’s Strategy for the Future Is Scary Smart

by Glen Hendrix

Long March 2. Long March 9 will be 4x bigger and deliver 18x the payload. Courtesy Wikimedial

When most Americans think of the Chinese, they think of an industrious, intelligent population. Smart enough and with enough inexpensive labor to make things good enough to sell cheap enough to claim market share and make money. The really hard stuff; the sophisticated electronics, avionics, bioprocesses, and software they obviously stole from us. And, ignoring the obvious moral questions, what does that say about their spy/hacking/computer/skills?

Americans forget the ancient Chinese invented gunpowder, paper, printing, kites, and umbrellas. Americans don't do history. Witness Afghanistan. We’ve certainly forgotten that the Chinese invented thorough testing of the people in charge of government before they are allowed to serve. Maybe we should steal that from them. 

What I’m trying to say is we don’t give the Chinese the credit they deserve when it comes to "the big picture" intellectual processes and strategic thinking. Also, Americans don't take into consideration the advantage the Chinese possess in having a central authority figure. Xi Jinping, aside from Vladimir Putin, is the closest thing to a king that exists in this modern era. As such, the country can react with astonishing speed and amazing focus to deal with such disparate problems as pollution and unwanted domestic public opinions. 

Paper or plastic? … If you said “paper”, read this. Plastic? Read this.

The democratic process in America, on the other hand, has sidetracked our progress in dealing with climate change, slowed down social equality, and created a lot of noise that hinders our march towards a smart, healthy population with very few poor and uneducated. That is because it is a process and has its ups and downs. We will get back on track. It just takes time.

In the meantime, China has announced its intentions to march into the future by putting an outpost on the Moon. That is why it is developing the Long March 9, a rocket that will put 140 metric tons into low earth orbit and 50 metric tons into trans-lunar orbit. This is the same capability as the Saturn V, the rocket that took U.S. astronauts to the Moon. How old hat, you say. Been there, done that. 

What you may not know is that China is also heavily invested in nuclear fusion technology with its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, EAST, at a large research facility at Dongpu Science Island in Anhui Province.

Also, helium-3 will make nuclear fusion much more efficient and eliminate nuclear waste and radiation. 

Also, the Moon is littered with helium-3. There is an estimated 1,100,000 metric tons trapped in lunar soil worth about 3 billion dollars per ton. 

Are you beginning to get the picture? I’ll spell it out for you anyway. The future of the planet depends on cheap, non-polluting energy of which fusion will be the world champ. It doesn’t matter who develops practical fusion, it will be done in the next few decades and licensed to anyone willing to pay the price. Having an established outpost on the Moon, China will be in the catbird’s seat to provide the budding fusion industry with what it needs most; helium-3. Three point three quadrillion dollars worth of it. If they are also the lucky ones to crack the fusion puzzle, they will be the undisputed uber energy czars of the twenty first century. 

Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags  

Pretty smart strategic thinking about the future, huh? With that kind of economic leverage China would never have to sweat the possibility of a trade war again.  However, it is not too late for two (and probably more) to play this game. By the time fusion technology is powering toasters, everyone will be wise to what the Moon represents for a nascent fusion industry. Perhaps we'll see a stampede of corporate startups to rival the dot com era. In fact, the Chinese are already in talks with the European Space Agency to make it a bilateral effort to build an outpost. We'll see how that works out.

In the meantime, while our current materials technology precludes the building of a space elevator on Earth, it will work on the Moon. This would be an efficient way to haul helium-3, water, and regolith into orbit around the Moon. Helium-3 goes to Earth's fusion reactors, water goes to needy vessels exploring the Solar System, and regolith is building material for space habitats. Recently discovered lava tubes on the Moon could provide inexpensive radiation shielding to the people carrying out lunar exploration and exploitation. Whether they want it or not, things are looking towards the Chinese enjoying a lot of company on the Moon.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Cryptocurrency Is Going Into Space

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

How We Can Diminish the Possibility of Water Wars

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

Workers In Space Will Live In Igloos

How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Energy and Space; Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why