Corporate Overlords are Mining the Sky

How many corporations do you know of that are willing to take a loss for 20-40 years? Are they going to try to reduce their losses by advertising in space?

Didn't I just make the same point?

Missed that sentence. :o

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Originally Posted by Wraith

Totally agree on the point that this would benefit everyone, and not just one country, though. Especially being done through a corporation - they tend to be significantly less nationalistic than national governments, and will just go for the best of what they want no matter where it comes from.

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There's an existential benefit too that goes well beyond making money.

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Originally Posted by Wraith

I'm fairly certain such a venture would eventually be profitable, I just have doubts about the time horizon for profitability. It might take 20-40 years to really start making money. When it does, it'll be a hell of a lot of money, but I doubt investors have that kind of patience.

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Well, the way things seem to go these days, with enough investment capital and/or jobs created, they could just get a government bail out and subsidies to keep them out of the red until those big profits kick in.

Not that I think it'll work either, but it's not like businesses need to rely on being profitable to stay in business these days - all they gotta do is convince the right politicians that they're strategically important or too big to fail or whatever and the public treasury is theirs to plunder.

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Originally Posted by Loki

How many corporations do you know of that are willing to take a loss for 20-40 years? Are they going to try to reduce their losses by advertising in space?

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The background of a lot of these people is technology etc where years of corporate losses have been standard for new companies, but investors have made a fortune even before the corporate profits eventually arrived. Not quite this many years but still.

The nature of modern business and the stock and bond markets is such that even if a business is not making a profit, investors still can. All that is required is confidence the investment will pay off.

I applied. They declined.

Edit: read most of the posts. Interesting thoughts.