ABL, pt. 1
Jon, in the comments to his post on auctioning off the ISS/Shuttle, makes some interesting points , but also raises a good question.
Though uncertain, he is entirely correct in that once one starts talking about physical assets, one can move beyond equity financing. Asset-based lending is exactly what the bank I work for does. I can't really talk a whole lot about specific examples because of corporate confidentiality (even if we don't necessarily have an NDA signed). People expect discretion of their investment bankers, which allows for the really frank and creative discussions that help drive private industry.
One asset the bank doesn't finance is satellites (unless some way could be found to make the yield equal the risk while avoiding usury laws). Exercising control over an asset means being able to put your hands on it when you need to. This is usually when a borrower doesn't pay per the contract they agreed to, but it also involves things like maintenance and upkeep. If your crappy broadcast satellite goes kablooie for some reason (like bad solar panels), one has no way to return it to service, the borrower is no longer able to generate revenues to pay the loan, and the depositors of the bank are now ticked off because the bank owns a $250Mn hunk of metal out in BFE and the return on their CDs just went down a few basis points.
Insurance companies and sat operators have worked out a secondary market for hobbled satellites, but insurers aren't terribly happy with the space field since every time they actually start making a bit of money on the retained premiums someone comes along with another crapped out satellite and a claim in hand.
The answer, regarded as Kool-Aid [tm] by some, is to have a team(s) in orbit that are able to routinely visit GEO. This is best done from L-1, but could be done very expensively from LEO. Having this option means that when the company's satellite goes kaput they now have an option: $250Mn for a new one, or $50Mn for the service team to go fix it. Suddenly the insurers are looking at the possibility of keeping some of their premiums, operators are breakeven much sooner, and bankers can finance the equipment notes on the assets.
There are other reasons to go to GEO as well. Salvaging the trash helps provide ease of mind to current operators, and the refuse is actually quite useful. First thing you want to do is an engineering analysis of it to see how it has weathered in the space environment. The larger the sample pool, the greater the opportunity to look for fluxes in the impact rate. There are quite a few old Russian kick-stages still floating around up there, but if you take a look at the records of the objects in GEO, and compare that with the list of actually functioning satellites there, you'll see that there are also a lot of interesting but dead satellites.
Could the fuel tanks from the Russian kick stages be harvested and re-used at a fuel depot? Could the rocket motors be salvaged? They use Silane (SiH4), IIRC, and could therefore theoretically be refueled from Lunar sources. Do the solar panels have any juice left? Could those be daisy chained to test early Solar Power Sat concepts? Could the satellite buses be used for deeper space/asteroid visit probes? (where only the scientific components are actually shipped up from Earth) Would the antennas be of use? Could any of the broadcast elements be salvaged to help set up a temporary Near Space Network to help traffic control?
Oh heck, just throw them into a Solar furnace, melt them into their constituent elements and send the results to the nano-tech labs on the Moon. (You see, if the nanobugs don't have to break stuff down, but have access to pure feedstock, you greatly increase their efficiency for replicator testing purposes…)
But I digress…
Though uncertain, he is entirely correct in that once one starts talking about physical assets, one can move beyond equity financing. Asset-based lending is exactly what the bank I work for does. I can't really talk a whole lot about specific examples because of corporate confidentiality (even if we don't necessarily have an NDA signed). People expect discretion of their investment bankers, which allows for the really frank and creative discussions that help drive private industry.
One asset the bank doesn't finance is satellites (unless some way could be found to make the yield equal the risk while avoiding usury laws). Exercising control over an asset means being able to put your hands on it when you need to. This is usually when a borrower doesn't pay per the contract they agreed to, but it also involves things like maintenance and upkeep. If your crappy broadcast satellite goes kablooie for some reason (like bad solar panels), one has no way to return it to service, the borrower is no longer able to generate revenues to pay the loan, and the depositors of the bank are now ticked off because the bank owns a $250Mn hunk of metal out in BFE and the return on their CDs just went down a few basis points.
Insurance companies and sat operators have worked out a secondary market for hobbled satellites, but insurers aren't terribly happy with the space field since every time they actually start making a bit of money on the retained premiums someone comes along with another crapped out satellite and a claim in hand.
The answer, regarded as Kool-Aid [tm] by some, is to have a team(s) in orbit that are able to routinely visit GEO. This is best done from L-1, but could be done very expensively from LEO. Having this option means that when the company's satellite goes kaput they now have an option: $250Mn for a new one, or $50Mn for the service team to go fix it. Suddenly the insurers are looking at the possibility of keeping some of their premiums, operators are breakeven much sooner, and bankers can finance the equipment notes on the assets.
There are other reasons to go to GEO as well. Salvaging the trash helps provide ease of mind to current operators, and the refuse is actually quite useful. First thing you want to do is an engineering analysis of it to see how it has weathered in the space environment. The larger the sample pool, the greater the opportunity to look for fluxes in the impact rate. There are quite a few old Russian kick-stages still floating around up there, but if you take a look at the records of the objects in GEO, and compare that with the list of actually functioning satellites there, you'll see that there are also a lot of interesting but dead satellites.
Could the fuel tanks from the Russian kick stages be harvested and re-used at a fuel depot? Could the rocket motors be salvaged? They use Silane (SiH4), IIRC, and could therefore theoretically be refueled from Lunar sources. Do the solar panels have any juice left? Could those be daisy chained to test early Solar Power Sat concepts? Could the satellite buses be used for deeper space/asteroid visit probes? (where only the scientific components are actually shipped up from Earth) Would the antennas be of use? Could any of the broadcast elements be salvaged to help set up a temporary Near Space Network to help traffic control?
Oh heck, just throw them into a Solar furnace, melt them into their constituent elements and send the results to the nano-tech labs on the Moon. (You see, if the nanobugs don't have to break stuff down, but have access to pure feedstock, you greatly increase their efficiency for replicator testing purposes…)
But I digress…
posted by murphydyne at 7:26 PM
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