I mentioned a while back that Russia's arctic domination seems to in large part a relic of gulag system and Stalinist misallocation of resources. Even with substantial subsidies people in the region now still don't seem to be fairing well. With people justifying spending in the arctic regions on the basis of securing natural resources it seems worth asking whether this will ever be worthwhile. Just how cost-effective are arctic resources? A Newsweek article suggests that Russian plans for extracting natural gas simply haven't proven cost effective, with foreign partners dropping out following a $20 billion investment in exploration in the region. And then there's another type of competition which a Globe and Mail article seems to hint towards:
The biggest pragmatic problem with Russia’s plans is one that will sound familiar to those working in the Alberta oil sands – it’s currently so expensive that it’s cheaper to put a rocket into space (where the Sochi torch also recently journeyed) than to drill a single oil well in Arctic waters.
With costs of that sort, it seems to me that space-based solar power starts to become a potentially more practical alternative.
Recently, use of 3D printing in such an endeavour has reduced estimated weight requiring a lift to orbit substantially, which would put it, using ballpark figures for a 4GW initial station at about $100 billion dollars, at about 4 times the construction costs of current coal or nuclear power stations. Once you've got those stations in place their incremental costs should be quite low and they don't stress the power grid in the same way that the intermittency of land-based solar panels does.
It seems to me that involving the moon also makes sense here - either as a place to build solar cells or as a launching point to put geosynchronous solar power stations into orbit. Even a 1979 estimate put the moon as a more cost-effective source of materials for building more than about 30 10GW space-based power stations. Automation has improved a lot since the 1970s and using the moon as a source also eliminates the negative impact from emissions due to launching materials from earth into orbit as well as reducing the amount of propellant required.
Both space-based solar power and arctic exploration are extremely expensive and quite risky. It seems to me that a reasonable case can be made for investing in space over the arctic. I'm also curious how much the cost of space-based solar power might be trimmed down through further investigation. As some have noted, India seems to have put together a Mars mission at about 10% of the cost of NASA and also, interestingly, less expensive than it took to produce that recent movie Gravity.
