Orbital Shipyards - Building Fleets in Space
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Isaac Arthur
4.8 • 739 Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A new industrial revolution is coming—not on Earth, but above it. This episode delves into how orbital shipyards will produce everything from shuttles to megastructures, changing how we explore and inhabit space.
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Credits:
Orbital Shipyards: Building Fleets in Space
Episode 722; June 5, 2025; Nebula Exclusive
Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur
Graphics:
Anthrofuturism
Bryan Versteeg
Fishy Tree
Jeremy Jozwik
Melanovis
Sergio Botero
SpaceResourcesCGI
Udo Schroeter
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator
Phase Shift, "Forest Night"
Kai Engel, "Endless Story of Sun and Moon"
Chris Zabriskie, "Unfoldment, Revealment", "A New Day in a New Sector", "Oxygen Garden"
Stellardrone, "Red Giant", "Billions and Billions"
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:15 Why Build in Orbit?
1:29 The Gravity Well Problem
3:22 Material Sourcing – The Importance of ISRU
5:44 Early Orbital Shipyards – Existing & Near-Future Projects
6:37 Lessons from Space Stations & Prototypes
8:22 Port George & Linus Scrapyard – Revisiting Fictional Shipyards
13:08 Infrastructure & Logistics of Orbital Shipyards
23:39 Constructing Different Types of Ships
31:58 Challenges of Large-Scale Shipbuilding
34:10 Maintenance, Repairs, and Refits – Sustaining a Spacefaring Fleet
39:25 Salvage and Recycling
40:37 The Future of Orbital Shipyards – Expanding Beyond Earth
43:03 The Rise of Megastructure Shipyards
44:29 Privatization and the Spacefaring Economy
46:12 Shipyards as Strategic Military and Political Assets
47:54 The Role of AI, Automation, and Post-Human Workforces
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, SFIA audio listeners. |
| 0:02.5 | In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory, |
| 0:05.2 | we're asked at the reason alien civilizations might be rare |
| 0:08.0 | is because most aliens are huge. |
| 0:10.5 | To hear it and every episode early and ad-free, |
| 0:13.3 | plus hours of bonus content, |
| 0:15.1 | check out go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur |
| 0:17.6 | and use my code, Isaac Arthur. |
| 0:21.0 | A warship, a colony vessel, an interstellar arc, all born in the void, never having known a |
| 0:27.5 | plant's touch. |
| 0:28.6 | What does it take to build entire fleets in space? |
| 0:35.2 | Why build in orbit? |
| 0:42.3 | For all of human history, ships have been built on land before they ever set sail. Even spacecraft so far have followed a similar pattern, constructed on Earth, carefully |
| 0:48.3 | tested and launched into orbit atop powerful rockets. |
| 0:52.3 | But as we expanded into the cosmos, a question inevitably arises, |
| 0:56.0 | why keep building ships on planets at all? If space is where they will live, why not build them |
| 1:02.3 | there from the start? After all, you don't build a submarine on a mountaintop, so why build |
| 1:07.2 | a spaceship at the bottom of a gravity well? The idea of orbital shipbuilding is not just a matter of convenience, its necessity for constructing |
| 1:15.5 | the vast fleets that may one day populate the solar system and beyond. |
| 1:20.6 | Launching a fully assembled spaceship from Earth is like trying to launch a fully built |
| 1:24.8 | ocean liner from the bottom of an ocean, it's inefficient, |
| 1:28.3 | expensive, and needlessly complicated, just ask Emperor Palpatine, though admittedly that |
... |
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