[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Witchking

However the start up costs are enough that I assume 100% of orbital food production will be tied up in feeding people in orbit.

I doubt IF the build out gets to the point of 100% supplying orbital food demand there will then be a drive to build more expensive orbital farms to ship 'down'.

I assume that the marginal improvements in growth and shipping costs will be more than offset by the large difference in upfront costs.

YMMV of course.

It would depend on a variety of factors, but that's probably not a bad assumption. The real question is how much of a startup cost there really is, at least for later farms. If you can mine and transport the raw materials for building and maintaining the farms from asteroids for less than you can ship them up from Earth, you would be able to get the startup costs down, potentially low enough to make it competitive with Earth. But that's probably not the way to bet.