I was thinking a bit more about satellites today and my mind wandered to a conclusion that, given the pace and current standing for which we're tossing rockets into space, we can expect that putting an object into LEO would be trivially more expensive than putting that same object into your backyard. With this in mind, what kind of opportunities open up? A fairly common answer to this is, "oh datacenters would be so useful because we don't have to worry about power and heating in space!!". Wrong!! Cooling things in space(i.e. a vaccum is incredibly difficult), and datacenters require extensive maintenance!
What opportunities open up in space when the cost to launch goes to $0?
Companies like Outpost and Varda have already jumped the line on working on manufacturing, for things like fiber optics and pharmaceuticals, where zero gravity can provide close to ideal crystallization.
- Space Based Solar Power - There's tens of papers from NASA, proving this out in simulation, and small scale experiments. Broadly speaking, the power propagation falls into optical and radio frequency transmission. The most public company working on this right now is Aetherflux.