The 1887 XDR Bottle of Wine

Yeah, 1887 Special Drawing Rights in my setting=$3. If 1887 Rs seems like a lot, well, in South Korea $3=₩3257.

There's a famous article called "The $11 Billion Bottle of Wine", about how interstellar trade will never be possible—even in SF settings, with FTL. Unfortunately a lot of the assumptions are, well, assumptions, and not good ones.

For instance, the current price of space-launches is $10-25k per kg. It's projected to drop to $500/kg, thanks to private competition. And methods like orbit elevators can drop it down to $200/kg. That lowers the cost of getting the ships, and cargo, off the ground. Indeed, containerized, low-fragility cargo can simply be pelted into orbit with Verne guns, probably lowering the price even further. That's a lot higher than air freight, admittedly, but considering the ROI from even small-scale asteroid mining, it'd be worth it. What I mean is, some of the substances you can mine from asteroids, are so hard to get here in the gravity well that their price per unit weight approaches high-end pharmaceuticals or even illicit drugs—and robotic mining has much lower overhead than pharma.

Once you're in space, the issue becomes the methods of interplanetary flight. Spaceship fuel is cheap, unless you're crazy enough to use antimatter rockets—ships use plentiful things like hydrogen and methane as propellant. Indeed, the expensive parts of spaceships are used in constructing the engine, since even an NTR needs a lot of shielding, and expensive superconductors. Again, though, many of the materials that go into hot superconductors can be mined from asteroids; the more spacefaring you do, the cheaper it gets. Plus, nuclear fusion power is projected to become feasible by the 2020s, and that means fusion spaceships won't be far behind—the NTR was invented a mere 13 years after the Chicago Pile achieved critical mass.

Okay, so, yes, at that point, you'd be limited to interplanetary commerce, realistically. But the article in question was in a gaming magazine, it wasn't concerned with realism: indeed, it specifically claims FTL won't make a difference. But, uh, what? If it's an FTL system like the slipspace drives in Halo, it'd be an incredible boon to commerce, since it can teleport directly from one low planetary orbit to another. Even if it's an only-usable-at-a-certain-distance system, like Niven's hyperdrive (and my space-folds), interstellar trade, in a civilization with FTL, is, ipso facto, no more expensive than interplanetary trade. With FTL, if you go out to whatever-"jump"-distance, jump to another star system, and then go from that new system's "jump" distance to the planet where you're trading, it costs the same as if you'd done the same amount of maneuvering in-system.

Now, I'll give you, it's unlikely there'll be any tramp freighters like Han Solo or Mal Reynolds. FTL drives sure as hell wouldn't be cheap, even if anyone was stupid enough to trust guys like that with spaceship engines, which they wouldn't be. Interstellar trade would be the purview of governments and mega-corps, quite possibly a neo-Mercantilist system...but of course, so would interplanetary trade. Oh, I know, mercantilism just never works, compared to the all-holy free market. That's why the Chinese owe so much money to the US.

Oh, wait.