Exploring the Asteroids

quakeaddict wrote to us with a cool feature about the upcoming Near Earth Asteroid Rendevzous with Asteroid Eros. It's got a rundown of the schedule of the mission. Hmm...now if they could just work out asteroid mining, we'd be doing fine.

Comments

Re:Maybe this is the one

[Anonymous Coward]

only if you have the matching purple sheets

Re:Impostor

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Please point that out each and every time, because no one has figured that out yet.

Thank you for your concern,

A dumb turd.

5*10^9 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two different things are being discused here.

The sun will leave the main sequence and turn into a red-giant in 5E+9 years.

The Earth will have been baked to death long before then.

I only recently came across a reference that explained it - you sound like you might be interested.

The ideal gas law states that the pressure of a gas id proportional to the number of particles per unit volume. In the suns core, 4 hydrogens fuse to form a helium, so the number of particles ( and thus the pressure ) is decreasing.

Because of this, the core is shrinking over time and gradually heating up. Since it's ignition about 4.5E+9 years ago, the energy output of the sun has increased by about 25%. Over the next 1E+9 years it will increase by about 10% ( the effect is *not* linear ).

Increased redient energy from the sun will cause water vapour to ascend to the troposphere. Above the ozone layer, UV radiation will cause it to disociate into H2 and O2. The H2 will escape into space and our planet will begin to desicate at an acelerating rate.

Estimates vary considerably on how long this will take - some say as little as 120 million years from now, but most are about 1E+9 years.

The alternative to space travel is to use focused laser pulses to induce thermal convection effects in the suns core, so that helium rich material from the core would rise into the outer regions and be replaced with fresh hydrogen. This would extend the lifespan of the sun by up to a factor of 50 ( hey, stellar fusion is very inefficient in some ways ).

This is regarded as an important point in the SETI debate - stars that were engineered in this manner would be detectable due to their higher than average helium content in their outer regions.

We have found no evidence for any such stars at this point in time. This tends to imply that intelligent species don't survive long enough to reach this phase of development.

uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

i think you missed the entire point of the post

I think they meant 2D

[Anonymous Coward]

the video game was 2D.

Re:Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race.

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, i guess if you consider a closet sized mercury capsule-ish spacecraft which appears to not even have fuel tanks that survive reentry......then it COULD be reuseable. the X-33, THATS a reuseable spacecraft looks much better too. http://x33.msfc.nasa.gov/

common sense of course

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone knows where the asteroids come from. They come from superior alien races who fire them haphazardly at benign worlds who can only defend themselves with two dimensional spacecraft with very poor controls, but are able to traverse the length of the universe and come out the other side merely by drifting to far in any one direction.

Shesh. Next they're going to claim to have solved the mystery of the Pac-Men. DUH!!!

Re:common sense of course

[Anonymous Coward]

just a quick note, i think you meant 3 dimensional spacecraft and not 2. a 2D spacecraft wouldn't be to usefull.

Re:First post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, When your IQ gets to 10, I suggest you sell. Yours, etc. AC

The face, what about the face on the Asteroid?

[Anonymous Coward]

FaceDK.gif is being covered up by the space agencies.

Thank you.

Re:The face, what about the face on the Asteroid?

[Anonymous Coward]

My friend Spankey loves that guy. My friend spankey is wondering when that movie is going to come out. My friend Spaneky is silly.

-A Friend of Spankey

My Friend Spankey once tried to explore...

[Anonymous Coward]

...an Asteroid. But my friend Spankey was trying to do it from my backyard. It was nighttime and my friend Spankey was looking at the sky with a flashlight. I yelled "Hey, my friend Spankey!!! You'll never be able to explore asteroids from my backyard!!!" Then my friend Spankey mumbled something about Geos and wandered off. -A Friend of Spankey

Where do you want to go today?

[Anonymous Coward]

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thank you.

Re:Where do you want to go today?

[mafelda]

OH MY GOD!!! bill gate$ has bought your SOUL!!!

X X
X X
X
X x Repent, sinner our god Tux is a
X X forgiveing one
X --Mafelda
X
X

(PS sorry, i couldt think of a buddist reference)

Re:Let me be the one to say

[Anonymous Coward]

ugh, for a lesson in what satire REALLY is, go here: www.theonion.com

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. I'm constantly harping on about how we're supposed to have Moon bases and hotels in space, and missions to mars by around about this time.

I don't mean to be rude, but it's exactly this attitude that has left us in the position we're in. How about instead of "harping on", you actually do something about putting bases on the moon or hotels in space. If you don't have the required technical skills, you can at least invest some cash in one of the several private companies attempting to make space accessible.

Pisses me off that we've not moved ahead with that, but hey, I guess we have better things to worry about as a species...

What could possibly be more important than the ultimate survival of the species? If it pisses you off so much, do something about it. The closing of software pissed off RMS - he didn't sit around and whine about it, he got proactive.

I guess the gravity well is bigger than our ability to overcome it right now, alas ...

Not from a technological standpoint. But we certainly lack the political will...

A

Can

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some tea?

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point of asteroid mining?

First it would require a large and expensive craft to land to an asteroid, then mine and then return to the earth.

Second most asteroids are rocky objects, so they contain same minerals that are abudant on the earth.

So you would get a few tons of iron ore at the cost of tens milliards of dollars, not very profitable.

You love this

[Anonymous Coward]

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Solid gold meteors are worth mining!

[Anonymous Coward]

A standard sized gold brick is worth about $250,000. A shuttle launch cost what $20,000,000? 100 bricks to break even. After that it's gravy. And since the craft is only weighted down on landing, extra weight is not a problem.

But this is fantasy, the real space mining is going to be for helium. All helium on earth is primordial and when freed from pockets underground, escapes into space. Earth will soon run out of helium and no process (safey or economically) produces it in bulk. However, Jupiter's got loads of helium to spare.

Re:Solid gold meteors are worth mining!

[Rombuu]

All helium on earth is primordial and when freed from pockets underground, escapes into space. Earth will soon run out of helium and no process (safey or economically) produces it in bulk. However, Jupiter's got loads of helium to spare.

Oh my goodness, what will we do without helium? How will the novelty balloon industry survive? Funny voices? Gone... We will be forced to liquidate all clowns... hmmm... what are the downsides of this again?

Re:Solid gold meteors are worth mining!

[Vidar Hokstad]

The responses to the message above may have a certain validity... But they ignore a few things:

There are other options besides the shuttle... We're talking about getting lumps of metal back to earth, not humans. Cheaper transportation should certainly be possible.

Also, it might be uneconomical to do shuttle flights with the intent of carrying gold down alone, but remember that there's already shuttle missions bringing material up, which could have some of their costs offset by carrying mined material back.

Last but not least: Gold is certainly not the most economical thing to bring back... Platinum for instance is much more rare and more precious, and there's plenty of other alternatives as well.

Half right

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.

Moving mass up through Earth's gravity will using current propulsion techniques is insanely expensive. Using other techniques (mass accelerators, microwave beamed energy, elevators from geosynchrous stations, etc.) is merely expensive. Getting mass back to Earth is CHEAP!!! What does it cost a meteorite to strike the Earth? Asolutely nothing! You just give a rock a shove in the right direction, and with time and patience, it falls to earth. Now, not having the rock destroy any cities when it lands is a been more difficult, but still, very little energy need be expended to guide it, as opposed to the tremendous energy needed to defeat the gravitational potential energy of Earth (P.E. = 0.5mgh, if I recall correctly)

Re:Ender's Game

[Anonymous Coward]

yes! Although he didn't know it at the time. (that he was attacking the buggers, that is.)

where do YOU want your money to go ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see all you people yamming on about how we should already be in space with all our moonbases by now.
We shouldn't even be launching anything but satellites to space !
Any usefull commercial or scientific work can be done using (inter-planetary) satellites. We don't need a spacestation, it's completely useless and only takes up money that could be used to maybe, oh, i don't know, feed the hungry, or something like that [sarcasm intended].
It's all just immature adolescent dicksize measuring. And that's all there is to it, no matter what the marketing says.
If they'd just stop launching things into space that aren't needed there and investing that money in education here on earth, we'd probably get all your spacestations, moonbases and warp-capable starships a LOT sooner then we will get them now.
I don't know how many of you have noticed, but right now we're not doing so well here on earth. So the next one how starts to me about how we should invest more in the space programme will get to know my figurative flamethrower.
And thus he ended the rant.

asteroid mining? not in my lifetime...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to echo a lot of the opinions I've glanced at on this topic.

1. Right now, it simply is not economically feasible to mine the Belt. Yes, I know this would enhance humanity's survivability. Yes, I know this would do wonders for our race as a whole. However, these are all abstract ideas and will not see us to the Belt.

2. Nobody cares. Take a good look around yourself, not only in the various media but also at the attitudes of your personal aquaintances. No one cares about space any more. I do, but me and a handful of other people simply is not enough motivation to get us there. Everyone has their heads on the ground, thinking about having to go to work tomorrow, about getting the kids from school, perhaps about a test in a couple of days.

Perhaps there will be an event that will give humans a fresh view of our place in the universe: a few very fragile biological forms on a single planet. We need to step back, look up at the sky, and review our progress as a species. We need to get out into space.

Oversoul

It is the Martians!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake up and smell the death ray. The Martians began this by letting us land some junk on Mars in areas where they could control what our probes could "see". They also let some of the probes take pictures unobscured, as long as the pictures were grainy enough. They disguised the face in a pretty unconvincing way, when we sent a high res camera up.

Then, when we tried to drop probes into populated civilian areas, they shot the probes down. Later, when we tried to drop one with Linux inside, it happened to be aimed at a military reservation, so it was captured and studied. Obviously because bandwidth constraints made this the most efficient methid of grabbing a copy of the kernl.

In the meantime, they have been shooting our airliners down, first in the "death ray range" also known as the Nantuckett or Fags Head triangle, the Hubble telescope (the only manmade object to withstand the blasts, but showing signs of wear, as the coded comments of the shuttle astronauts document), then in California. California became a target when we began shooting Star Wars rockets from CA recently. But, as everybody familiar with the Philidelphia Experiment knows, the eastern USA is easier for Mars based energy weapons to hit. If you are too stupid to figure out why, I am not going to tell you.

Now, they are shooting down Russian space junk (since Russian stuff is junk before, during and after launch) just because they can.

Stop the FUD and launch an attack, you earth based, draft dodging cowards!

One word: recycling

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard, mass-energy could be neither created or destroyed. I sincerely doubt that much of the material we mine from asteroids will be leaving the solar system, thus unless we make a habit of sending all of our used Toyotas plummetting into the Sun, all that material should still be around to build whatever. Now, if we bring it all back to Earth, we gotta expend some energy to get it back out of the Earth's gravitational well, but then, if you got enough energy to leave the solar system, you've probably got enough energy to put a few rocket pieces into orbit...

Re:One word: recycling

[mafelda]

it take vary little energy to leave the solorsystem, now ittakes a lot of power to get out vary FAST...

You'll love this even more...

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:You'll love this even more...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a poodle!

Re:You'll love this even more...

[Tricycle]

Sorry, what _is_ this supposed to be? I've been spending hours trying to work it out - please let me know, it's driving me mad!

Re:Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race.

[Anonymous Coward]

the Delta Clipper? vertical (powered) landing is just dumb if you dont HAVE to do it. sure the design was fantastic and it even landed suceesfully afer a small explosion, but carrying all that extra fuel to land vertically is inexcuseable. Now the Hyper-X THATS a reuseable spacecraft! oh im getting tired of this already.

Re:ummmm a rock?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're living on basically a rock.

In case you forgot, I still love Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:In case you forgot, I still love Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

And I like to surgically remove the gonads of individuals such as yourself, slice them thinly, fry them in butter and eat them on my morning toast. So what's your point?

Re:In case you forgot, I still love Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I dislike RedHat
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User IDs are never removed

[Anonymous Coward]

That way Slashdot can appear as a really big community of 150,000 users to investors.

Re:User IDs are never removed

[Anonymous Coward]

this got a zero but the others were moderated as 1s, eh?

Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a thanks for letting me know what was up with the Elite series. Silly me, I thought the series was dead. Good to know that it will be continued.... I never knew that you could orbit asteroids in FFE, though. Neat trick.

I want my money to save the species

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's all just immature adolescent dicksize measuring."

Sounds like a logical argument.

"...stop launching things into space that aren't needed there and investing that money in education here on earth..."

Then I present you with this scenario:
Sometime in the near future, a long period comet enters the edge of our solar system from the Oort Cloud. Because long period comets enter the solar system but once, we have no record of its existence.

Amateur astronomers detect, name, and track the new sky object. After three nights of measurement, it appears that the interloper will be near earth in perhaps a month or two. Perhaps a week after discovery, universities and agencies get involved and discover that it's on a collision course. The counter is at a little under two months.

The comet does not collide with Earth, it doesn't need to. It passes harmlessly, but dangerously close, between Earth and the moon. The side of the planet facing the incoming comet takes the brunt of the attack. Impactors ranging in size from 10 meters to perhaps 500 meters in size travel in a stream with the comet and pepper the Earth's surface like a blast from a shotgun.

We'll give Earth the benefit of the doubt, saying that the comet approached Earth from the rear, so we needn't add the orbital velocity of the Earth to the impact velocity of the objects.

The damage is catastophic, but not terminal on a planetary scale. Objects that strike land devestate rural areas and a few urban centers with the intensity of a low-yeild nuclear weapon (for the small bits), but ranging up to 100 Megatons. All in all, not bad.

The danger, however, is the ocean strikes. A 500 meter impactor strikes the Pacific Ocean. Japan, the Phillipines, northern Australia, New Zeland, the Aleutians, Kamchatka, the west coast of the US, and the various atolls and such are completely obliterated by a tidal wave that moves quick enough to rule out major evacuation of the damage zones.

So there it is. We have decided to go with spending on Earth, instead of self-sufficient space stations, Moon bases, and Mars colonies. Luckily we'll get a second chance. If this REALLY happens, we may not be so fortunate.

I recommend you pick up Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets by Duncan Steele. He's an authority on this topic, and I found it an interesting read. The book talks about the history of impacts on Earth (like the Tunguska event of 1908; a few hours difference and Moscow would have been leveled), determining impact destruction, prevention (more like detection), and it has some interesting photos as well.

Oversoul

Would Someone Like...

[Anonymous Coward]

to explore my Ass Hemorroids?

thank you.

Re:Well, ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

> Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?
Nope, they used hogheads.

Re:Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be alive then if your brain gets copied to electronic form in 50 years from now...

huh

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they calculated the effect the spacecraft is going to have to the orbit and revolution of the asteriod.

Re:huh

[Graymalkin]

Negligible dingleberry, Eros is very large, the probe landing on it it very very very very small by comparison. It will have a similar effect to you headbutting Mt. Everest.

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Anonymous Coward]

> And now here it is, the year 2000, and we don't even have a proper space station yet.

Ya, right. and I bet you think there's only ONE hubble satellite??

Is Spankey your monkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, is he?

It is an ASTEROID!

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT Uranis! CNN Entertainment

thank you>

Re:First post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha ha ha, wow you a funny! Quit your day job flipping burgers and hit open mic night at a comedy club now, before an asteroid falls on you.

NEAR

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta love those recursive anachronyms

I wonder what they'll find ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jon Katz naked and petrified?

a lesson in openbsd sysadmining

[Anonymous Coward]

ifconfig ep0|awk '/inet / {print substr($2,index($2," ")+1)}'|awk '/208/ {print substr($0,index($0,".")+8)}'

dhcp is ghey

Eros

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmmm... the asteroid EROS....

Why this story?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does this story count as worthy enough to be posted on Slashdot? I mean, what the hell does this have to do with Andover.net, VA Linux or any of their really neat-o keen employees? I thought this was Slashdot -- All VA Linux stories, all the time! I want to read more articles on why VA Linux buyout of Andover.net is the biggest event since Linus was born. I want to know about the incredible personalities behind the company. I want to know! Please! Please! Please! I want my VA Linux stories!

Re:Completely Offtopic!

[substrate]

It's been one of the revolving adds for quite a while, possibly since before Andover. I realize you're just a troll with unusually high karma but since you admittedly usually browse with banners blocked you could at least have checked the facts.

I'm not even sure why you're so up in arms about JAVA banner adds. You can not click it, use junkbuster like you normally do or disable JAVA. Just because somethings there doesn't mean you HAVE to click on it.

Re:Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race.

[Zigurd]

True story: When the first Space Shuttle was launched, I was working in Austria at a U.N. econometrics institute - which is to say a boondoggle and nest of spies. About half the East Bloc contingent there worked for various security and spy agencies. Mostly they were there to keep an eye on the legit researchers - when they were not filching BSD Unix to run on their stolen VAXes.

It was by no means certain the Shuttle would work: tremendously complex, solid fuel boosters, lots could go wrong. And the Russians were working on "Buran" - their own shuttle. Everyone at my workplace was watching TV when the shuttle went up. At the moment it cleared the launchpad structure, one of the Russian KGB men whispered to me "It's over, you have won." I looked at him and he repeated his statement. I could tell he meant much more than that the race to build a space shuttle was over.

Lesson: There are bigger purposes than space exploration that drove development of craft like the Shuttle. Look at Hubble and compare it to 70's era spy sats, like the one in the Smithsonian. A strong family resemblance. On can only wonder, for now, what the Shuttle was really meant to carry. Someday it will probably come out that the Shuttle was something like the "deap sea mining" ships Hughes built to raise a russian sub, or the "deap sea rescue subs" that did who-knows-what. Remember Reagan's "Orient Express" hypersonic plance announcements? Wonder what black program that quietly slipped into?

Any buffs out there have a chronology of classified shuttle flights? Anyone have a good conspiracy theory about classified space planes?

Re:Oops! All Berries!

[Zigurd]

Excellent post.

Getting into space in a big way is a very long term project. We are best off collecting information and trying some simple experiements for now.

As for overpopulation, there are some places on Earth that are overpopulated, but the Earth is still pretty empty. This is not counting any technological changes that might let us live under/on the seas in large numbers. In a thousand years, our ability to house and feed people might seem as relatively primitive as medieval agriculture and fishing is to us.

So it won;t be to get elbow room that we go to space. Space colonization will have to have its own rewards that outweigh the challenges, costs, and inconveniences. This balance may not be reached for quite a long time, like thousands of years. A good supprting project would be to make sure we have clean elections, personal and economic liberties, and good educational opprtunities all over the Earth so we don't end up resetting the Human Progress register to zero at some point between now and when we are ready for really going to space.

Re:Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race.

[cpt kangarooski]

It probably ended up landing on top of the Mars Polar Lander ;)

Economics of exploring "new worlds"

[freeBill]

We should not forget that there was 100 years between Columbus and the British colonies in America. At first the explorers were all trying to find a way to discover riches (spices, cities of gold, whatever) which could be brought back to Europe.

But the real money was made when people began to realize they could go to America and create wealth to be enjoyed there.

The same logic applies in space: As long as we try to justify space exploration by wealth we can transmit back to earth, we will continue to be defeated by the fact that we live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well. And trying to find wealth at the bottom of another gravity well like Mars only doubles the difficulty.

Energy is free in space, and transportation is free as long as you avoid those pores on the face of the space-time continuum we call "planets." So the only question is whether we can find the elements we need out there in the asteroid belt (or the rings of the gas giants, since transport is free).

And the elements we need basically come down to water (which includes oxygen, of course) and a little carbon. There's lots of iron out there, so we can probably avoid using this inconvenient aluminum stuff.

Perhaps it's unfortunate that Americans were the first to discover the means to get to space. They don't want to go there until they build something there that's better than modern America. And, let's face it, the United States is a pretty nice place to live.

Too bad the Haitians don't have space travel. They'd probably be heading out all the time. You think the Challenger disaster shows a risk in spaceflight? Try crossing an ocean in an inner tube sometime.

Impostor

[Bruce Perens]

This isn't me. Note the "." at the beginning of the user name.

Bruce

Re:Oops! All Berries!

[stevelinton]

1) If huge bales of pure gold metal were floating in orbit and all you had to do was open the shuttle doors and scoop it up with rakes, it would still come nowhere near offsetting the cost of a shuttle launch. Or the next generation of "cheap" vehicle launches. Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.

No one is seriously proposing such a process. In the short term mining would be for water (probably in the form of water ice) for use in space (electrolyzed, as fuel and oxygen, or "straight" to drink).

Moving mass off Earth will stay expensibe for a while, but getting it back could become cheap rather quickly. You only need to drop something slightly below orbital velocity and it will start being slowed down by the atmosphere. Simple controls will crashland it on the desert or ocean of your choice. Not much more is needed to soft land.

Many/most asteroids are made of fluff, crap, and dust. They are not rocks. They are not mine-able, and they do not offer a place to land.

All the better. For most purposes you actually want a mini-comet, say 10m across and mostly made of "dirty snow". A mining probe simply floats near it, puts a "bag" over all or part of the surface and starts heating it up with reflected sunlight. Then pipe the steam round into the shadow of the mirror and condense it. Rock is juts a nuisance, and landing is just a way to cope with too much gravity.

Sorry, Eros naked and ...

[craw]

Going straight to karma hell, but shouldn't somebody post, Eros naked and petrified (forget the hot grits). Afterall, Eros is the Greek god of erotic love (much better a topic than NP). But then again, the petrified part of things would sort of put a chill of things. Then again, the chill could be counteracted by hot grits:-)

More karma hell. I have to wonder what is the shape of the asteroid Eros? If you saw two movies last summer (one was the Phantom Menance) then you know that it look like a dick, woody, wang, johnson, prick, wiener, privates with two... Also, please don't answer this by posting by putting up the infamous link. Been there, wish I did that.

Dollars per tonne

[leonbrooks]

What's the point of asteroid mining?

Firstly, where it might cost $X a tonne to mine iron ore, get it to the processing plant and rip the iron out here on Earth, you can park a big mirror behind an asteroid, net it, spin it, and get millions of tonnes of stratified minerals for maybe $X/10 tonne. This is possible because vacuum doesn't conduct or convect heat away, and energy in the form of sunlight is readily available

Second, nasty things like oxidation don't happen in a vacuum, so processing said minerals is also easier, and achieving higher purity is also easier.

Thirdly, and most interesting from my POV, an infrastructure is necessary to do this, and can also be used for other things; and the byproducts of refining, regarded as junk on earth, are still useable as building materials and reaction mass - and are already in orbit.

If you don't want metal or other products in orbit, the solution is simple: you make a big hat-shaped thingy out of your ore, park anything else you want to deorbit inside the hat, and drop it peak-first into an ocean. A little of it ablates away during the drop, but most of it survives to float "gently" down like a shuttlecock at a few hundred miles an hour an wind up as a big metal barge floating somewhere near its final point of use. I'm sure Japan would consistently land theirs on whale herds for research purposes, but never mind.

It would lend new meaning to the phrase "at the drop of a hat" and the choice of Linux distribution to run the instrumentation on would be moot. (-:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

[leonbrooks]

...by Robert Anson Heinlen. Read it!

Re:The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

[lisseut]

sounds familiar - what's it about?

== HEDGEHOG SAYS:
\\\\\_o "It could well be that your question makes sense,
\\\\\/,, I just can't figure it out." - Cormack, CS 444

11km/s

[leonbrooks]

That's what happens when you drop a rock straight down from space to ground on Earth. It would go through all the significant atmosphere in about two seconds, maybe three. Throw a car-sized rock (say 8m3 @ say 3t/m3 = 24t) at 11km/s, and even if you lost half, that's a staggering number of joules converted to heat at impact.

Go view some footage of Shoemaker/Levy hitting Jupiter if you think throwing rocks is trivial.

Re:11km/s

[PD]

Throwing rocks is not trivial. Dropping them from 30,000 feet IS trivial.

If you think that dropping a large steel sphere from 30,000 feet will make a bigger boom than a bomb, then why did they put explosives in the bombs? You see my point?

Nobody's arguing with you about objects dropped from solar orbit onto Jupiter.

Re:Solid gold meteors are NOT worth mining!

[leonbrooks]

A standard sized gold brick is worth about $250,000. A shuttle launch cost what $20,000,000? 100 bricks to break even.

A subsidised launch is $50M, so 250 gold bricks. Real cost, what? $100M (500 bricks)? $150 (750 bricks)? Which weigh enough to seriously challenge the flying ability of a Shuttle, plus if you didn't stack them evenly about the floor of the load bay and brace them, would seriously challenge the structure of a shuttle.

Then consider the effect of dumping tens of tons of gold on the market every few months.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[PD]

Somehow I think this doesn't make much sense. I think even a 2000 pound bomb is going to make a bigger boom than a 20000 pound sphere dropped from 50,000 feet.

The sphere isn't going to get going fast enough on the way down to disintegrate or explode. All it will do is bury itself into the dirt.

This sounds like the myth of the penny dropped off the Empire State Building.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[PD]

A penny will *not* go through a person! There's something called air resistance, and a penny would sting a bit if dropped from the ESB, but it wouldn't kill anyone.

No way.

[kels]

A shuttle launch costs more like $500 million (depending on how you do the accounting).

The outside limit of the shuttle's maximum landing payload is about 50,000 pounds. With gold at about $300 per troy ounce, that's about $220 million in bullion you could bring back, if it was already hanging around in low earth orbit.

You still lose plenty. Or rather, the taxpayers do.

PS Sorry about the lame units, that's how NASA gives the numbers. And gold is always troy ounces.

Re:No way.

[bluGill]

Okay, we agree that it isn't worth it to send the shuttle up in space to mine all the gold that is hanging around for the taking in orbit.

Lets change the parameters slightly. You send the shuttle up for some unrelated mission. Repair the hubble or whatever. Now take a day, however much the shuttle can safely get back to earth, and leave. No it isn't profitable on its own. But if you have a payload that will pay for a one way trip, and nothing profitable to take on the return trip, you can still make money with the unprofitable because you have to come back anyway. So long as the cost of one extra day in space (when nothing else is going on, is less then the worth of the gold on earth you come out ahead. So using yourn figgure, the cost to repair the hubble is no longer $500 million, but 500-220 = 280 million dollars. Still a great cost to tax payers, but much less then otherwise.

Of course this ignores the effect on the price of gold. Not that it matters, since there isn't unlimited amounts of gold un orbit just waiting for someone to take.

NEAP

[Bersig]

If you like that, you might be interested in SpaceDev's spacecraft, NEAP. It's a totally privately-financed project to rendezvous with the asteroid Nereus in 2002. It is currently scheduled to launch in 2001.

The cool thing is that they plan to stake a claim to Nereus, thus the "P", for "Prospector".

From one of their PRs:

The spacecraft, Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP), first in a series of SpaceDev deep space Prospectors, will carry up to five advanced scientific instruments to an asteroid near the earth in order to analyze its size, and determine its composition and value. SpaceDev intends to sell the acquired data as a commercial product as well as stake claim to the asteroid in order to set a precedent for private property rights in space.

"NEAP's success will prove that space is a place, not a government program," said Benson. "Private companies and the public can and should have a direct stake in the opportunities space exploration and development have to offer," he added.

I really hope they pull it off!

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Mazzella!]

We don't even have any people in space, let lone moon bases, space stations, etc... Zero, Zilch, Nada... Unless I am forgetting someone there is no one on Mir, the International Space Station, Orbiters, or Space Shuttles. If you asked someone 20 years ago if there would be humans in space on the dawn of the new millennium(*), they would have answered yes, of course!

(*)Using word millennium based on popular usage, and the fact I start counting at 0 not at one!

Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[B.D.Mills]

There is one good reason why we should not mine the asteroids, or be selective about the asteroids that we do choose to mine.

And that is the future of the human race.

Sometime over the next thousand million years, the Sun will heat up sufficiently to render the Earth uninhabitable. All the people on Earth will have to find another home somewhere, and that home will ultimately be in another solar system. We will probably need a very large supply of readily-accessible metals so that we can send all the human population of Earth to another world, along with a necessary part of Earth's ecosystem.

If we mine all the asteroids indiscriminately, when the time comes we will be unable to escape the solar system. Squandering the whole of this metal supply so that a select few can live in luxury in their lifetimes may turn out to be the ultimate crime against humanity.

The solution is simple. Make the biggest metal-rich asteroids off-limits, but allow smaller asteroids to be mined. That way, the mercantile interests of asteroid mining companies will be adequately served, and asteroids will be preserved for the inevitable future exodus from the solar system.

--

Re:Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[ENOENT]

The estimate I've heard is that the sun will go red giant in 5*10^9 years. That's quite a while. I suspect that 5 billion years is long enough to think of something more elegant than a "simple" solution. In fact, there will have to be a better solution, since the real bottleneck in evacuating people from Earth would be in getting them to orbit in the first place.

Re:Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[SEWilco]

Um.. you think using up the metal supply will destroy it? No, it can be recycled. If nothing else, toss your garbage in a solar furnace and everything will melt/vaporize and you can smelt it down to what you want. Remember, when you're in space you can make large enough mirrors to get a lot of heat.

The worst that could happen is a lot of the metal gets dropped in the sun. But a single asteroid has more metals than we have here on the surface of the Earth. And if we really needed the metals we might make some really big magnetic tubes and distill what's floating in the sun...but first we can mine Mercury and Venus if we're that desperate...or help Io spray itself into space more quickly.

Re:Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[SpaceCadet]

Better idea. Allow unrestricted mining and exploitation now. Within 100 years, someone will be building a starship.

Actually, they'd be building permanent orbiting colonies inside of 20 years, and it would be child's play to turn one of those into a starship.

Either way, don't block of the easiest and richest strikes; that might prevent it from happening at all.

Re:Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[JDevers]

In a few billion years we will either have expanded throughout most/all of the galaxy or destroyed ourselves. If we haven't spread beyond this solar system in even a million years, we don't really DESERVE to exist because we really ARE the Alabama of the universe...

Re:Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[Winged Cat]

Or we could just recycle the metal after those who lived their lives of luxury die, leaving their metal in neat little piles on Earth rather than in ores floating about somewhere in the solar system at random high velocities, and who funded and developed the technologies to get said metals - for their own use at first, but which got spread around.

The trickle-down effect might not work over periods of a few short years, but a million years ought to be long enough to distribute any technology in use today. And, who knows, maybe they'll come up with ways to allow, and then encourage, FTL access to the stars within a mere thousand years while they're joyriding around the planets rather than railing against government sanctions.

Re:Asteroid mining and the future of humanity

[Ertai]

Your argument and other "conservation" arguments for not mining asteroids simply don't make a whole lot of sense when you figure out the amount of asteroid material actually available out there. Let me throw out some numbers:

Let's say that we've mined 1% of the Earth's crust down to a depth of 1 mile. The actual amount is probably way, way less than this, but let's just go with it for the moment.

The radius of the Earth is 3960 miles, so this gives us roughly 2 * 10^6 cubic miles of material.

Let's say a decent size asteroid has about a 12 miles radius. We will probably be able to mine the entire asteroid which gives us about 7200 cubic miles of materials. This means that mining about 275 decent sized asteroids equals the amount of material mined from the Earth.

According to my Compton's 1998 Encyclopedia (I know, it's outdated, but it's the closest at hand), there are over 5000 known asteroids! Many are smaller than 12 miles in radius, but some are considerably larger. There is easily 100s of times more material in asteroids than has ever been mined from the surface of the Earth! And this doesn't consider other sources like the moon, other planets, etc.

I've made a few simplifying assumptions, but the point is, there's more than enough material to go around for mining, conservation, starship production, etc.

Ender's Game

[ajlitt]

Hey, isn't Eros the hollowed-out asteroid where Ender and his squadron led the attack against the Buggers?

The article doesn't seem to mention...

[Kagenin]

...where Eros is in relation to Earth. I saw a whole buncha numbers about where it is in relation to NEAR, but not to home. Anybody got some REALLY pertinant numbers?

Kagenin

"Space boy, I'll kill you...it won't be long"
Smashing Pumpkins

==

Re:The article doesn't seem to mention...

[SEWilco]

Maybe NEAR status will help. Diagrams and numbers.

Re:The article doesn't seem to mention...

[alanb0]

The article does say:

The spacecraft and the asteroid are both roughly 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth -- and experts emphasize that there's absolutely no danger that Eros will collide with our planet, at least for the next few million years or so.

actually, i just took the readings from the near mission status page, which is accessible via http://near.jhuapl.edu ... it's very cool, provides some sort of javascript updated distance for near-eros and near-earth.

by the way, the distances change quite a bit from day to day, i'll have to update them.

best, alan boyle, msnbc

Re:The article doesn't seem to mention...

[kulturkritik]

wow. in that diagram, the asteriod matilde is even bigger than the sun, even. I'm worried. They say that it won't hit the earth, but that's a big piece of rock...

Re:Completely Offtopic!

[Kagenin]

Yes, OT, but it does make a decent point. That Java banner is pissin' me off.

Hey /. guys, don't suppose you could knock off the Caffinated Banners, couldya?

Kagenin

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[SEWilco]

Never heard of that. A steel ball would have a high terminal velocity and a lot of inertia, but not enough for a kinetic blast. Dropping it from orbit it would reach much higher speeds...and only be in atmosphere for the last 10 miles.

I did, however find: "Glenn Dropped From Shuttle Experiment"

Re:Oops! All Berries!

[SEWilco]

Asteroid mining. Do some web searches.

• We'd prospect for the kind of asteroid we want. Metal or fluff, depending upon whether we need metal framework or acoustic tiles.
• Any part of the surface is "a place to land". Low gravity. Harpoons probably needed to stay in solid contact.
• Smelt with mirrors. On Earth we can melt metals with mirrors. A lot easier when we don't have to hold mirrors in place against gravity.
• Space colonization is not a population growth measure. Not enough people can be moved...unless we can build space elevators. Colonists would be a few people and their children. Population growth can happen off-planet also.
• Space is enormous. Plenty of room for some humans.

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[SEWilco]

You don't understand. You keep your metals in orbit, where they're useful to build your space infrastructure very quickly.

A single nickel-iron asteroid has more metals than we have available in the Earth's crust, so that's a lot of building material. You might find it useful to bring down some platinum, gold, and titanium if you really need it...and those aren't as abundant here.

Of course, if you really want to bring down iron you can. You can deliver a lot more of it to any location on Earth than the competition could...just start building iron gliders in orbit, or iron darts if you have enough room for the crater.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[SEWilco]

Actually, the Space Shuttle can carry a bus. But a bus is hollow. A solid chunk of iron is much heavier.

You can see the effects of a 150-foot piece. It's called Meteor Crater. Crater 2.4 miles in circumference.

I agree with the previous poster. Read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress for the classic rocks-from-space show. Follow it up with Footfall.

Re:Manifest Destiny

[SEWilco]

Wasn't Heinlein the only major SF author who said we'd leave the Moon once we reached it? I'm sure he was not trying to predict that, it just happened...

Miners Ho'

[JJ]

To mine an asteroid we'd probably need to put a mass acclerator on it. Nobody wants to do it yet though because putting such a thing in space would horribly upset the peaceniks who think that if you put one thing that could be a weapon up there whos to stop the spread. See Al Gore's campaign page for a load more foolerly like that.

Re:Another view.

[Wah]

Here's another version, it seems asteroid mining angers interstellar warlords.

Re:Mining the sky

[jamesc]

Mining the Sky is good, as is the previous volume Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment, which provides a reason to mine asteroids. (I.e. Develop the space infrastructure or die.) I've found the book on sale at Barnes & Nobel for $6.

I also liked Lewis and Lewis' earlier work (out of print) Breaking the Bonds of Earth: Utilizing Space Resources (or some such).

Haven't picked up a copy of Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth: Computer Modeling yet. Must see if the Univ of Arizona press has it, because I'm still angry at Amazon.
--

Not quite

[p3d0]

First of all, the Earth's gravity is not much less in near-Earth orbit than it is on the ground. For instance, at 600 km, it would be within 20%.

Secondly, I think the terminal velocity argument it moot, since you (and I) have no idea what terminal velocity of a rock would be.

However, here's something to notice...

Sans atmosphere, it would take about 350 seconds to hit the ground from 600km. Thus, it would hit at about 3500 m/s, which is about 2 miles per second.

So, even without wind resistance, we're talking only 16% of the kinetic energy of the same rock at 5 miles/sec. Then you add atmospheric drag, and you're probably in the single-digit range.

--
Patrick Doyle

Did the Russians steal the design from the US?

[GMontag]

The article describes an air breaking system similar to the one TGV Rockets designed for their re-useable rocket.

Recursive acronyms.

[Yet Another Smith]

NEAR Earth Asteroid Rendesvous...

I like recursive acronyms that actually make USE of the first word.

Re:Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race.

[georgeha]

Anyone have a good conspiracy theory about classified space planes?

Well, you could search on Aurora.

I also recall reading somewhere about huge tanks of liguid methane at Lockheed, and plans for a small, hypersonic wave rider (maybe mach 5).

All useless conjecture, though.

George

Re:2,900 miles != 4,700 miles

[alanb0]

Phew, thanks for pointing that out. Fingers moving faster than brain, I'm afraid. Should be fixed now. Please feel free to write me at alan.boyle@msnbc.com with any fixes or suggestions re space and science. I really enjoy tuning in /. and am gratified whenever y'all mention a story of mine.

Best, Alan Boyle

Re:Completely Offtopic!

[Felius]

True, but it fills up netscape's memory and causes Navigator to crash.

And you're blaming *Slashdot* for this??

#include sig.h

Cool animation

[yellowstone]

Check out the "Astronomy picture of the day" for 02/10/00, which features a very cool (but unfortunately very low resolution) movie of asteroid 433, which Eros is set to rendezvous with on 2/14/00... -y

Re:Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race.

[SpaceCadet]

It's only dumb to land vertically if you never intend to make it practical on a commercial basis. Commercial practability means the ability to land the sucker at existing airports, which, considering horizontal-landers typically need a runway the size of Tennessee, is impractical for any but a vertical-land craft.

Re:Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race.

[SpaceCadet]

the X-33, THATS a reuseable spacecraft looks much better too.

Now if only it could be made to fly... as of the last Critical Design Review I attended, it was still 5000 pounds overweight. Which a certain group of engineers pointed out years ago, and were subsequently canned.

Bring back the Delta Clipper. Now THERE's a spacecraft.

Offtopic - slashdot login

[SLOfuse]

Boom

OK I'm done with this user id. Does anyone know how to change a slasdot user id? Or how to remove your own account? Any help appreciated.

Re:Offtopic - slashdot login

[link2NULL]

You can't... you could always get rid of the cookie and start over as a new user, and I guess your old user id would go away someday.

Re:Offtopic - slashdot login

[.Bruce Perens]

Beats me. I just got one myself.

Bruce

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[MarkKomus]

Well if its possible to do this, it probably could be used as a weapon of mass destruction. But it would not reduce the threat of your enemy responding with convensional nukes. So your country would be radiated, there's would be destroyed but rebuildable.

Not like the laser work that has been done, on being able to shoot nukes down as they come in. Which prevents your enemy from responding in kinda to nuclear war.

How about being able to move them first?

[matman]

I would rather see us be able to move asteroids first - not only would we be able to prevent them from hitting us, we could somehow bring them closer so that we could mine them more efficiently. But we're still looking at something pretty far off - I think we're going to see cybernetics and really high tech first. I mean, it takes a lot of energy to get out there, and theres no really inticing reason to do it yet. Maybe when we run outa stuff terrestrialy.

I heard that!

[Tau Zero]

It was the obnoxious Javascript bouncing ball in the Sun ad which finally made me kill Javascript in my browser. I killed animations long ago, and I am now nuking connections to every ad site which tries to serve me a cookie.

I will never see ads from sites which serve cookies, and I will not see anything except the first frame of animated ads. If you want the impression revenue or click-through revenue from me, you should not use cookies or animations from any ad on your ad servers. Rob, Jeff, are you listening?
--

Re:Completely Offtopic!

[jesser]

It's been one of the revolving adds for quite a while, possibly since before Andover.

Today was the first time I saw those things on slashdot. And they are annoying.

--

Mining the sky

[jesser]

Has anyone read Mining the Sky? The reviews on amazon make it sound pretty good, but I already have a huge queue of books to read, so I haven't gotten around to purchasing it yet.

--

Re:Mining the sky

[Paul Fernhout]

Excellent book!

John Lewis (the author) is one of the heros of the space settlement revolution. A more technical book by him is "Physics and Chemistry of the Solar System": http://www.astro.umd.edu/ ~mcfadden/books/Lewisreview.html

He is involved somehow with Spacewatch (a program at the University of Arizona, led by Dr. Tom Gehrels) which has done much of the pioneering work in the field of NEO detection. http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/asterimp.h tml

Another good site is: http://www.permanent.com/ where Mark Prado also has a book on this topic.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[litesgod]

The military did look into this at one time. I believe it was something like droppping a high density object (ball of steel) from a B-52 or the like flying at 50,000 feet. The destructive power was less then Hiroshima, but still much greater then conventional weapons. I think the tests were done in the '50's. I have no idea where I heard this/read this, but I do remember it. So unless it came from a crack dream, there you go. Of course, the downside is you can still acheive a pseudo-nuclear winter from all the dust ejected into the atmosphere.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[Dinosaur Neil]

Yeah, I remember that. Cool book. But I was driving an Atari ST at the time and couldn't afford a Mac, or the hypercard, or the electronic form of the book. I especially like the idea of targeting the "brass" first to shorten the war... That and using the GAU-8A as a primary weapon; G.E. We bring good things to light.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[Dinosaur Neil]

All right, I'll bite; what should I have used? I was doing (very) rough numbers and felt that two significant figures for g was pushing it. And I could have gone the whole gravatational constant times mass of Earth times mass of projectile over radius of Earth times radius of orbit, and even thrown in a terminal velocity calculation (even a teflon coating wouldn't eliminate air friction, just reduced it), but I was just looking for a ballpark figure and 9.81 m/s^2 is what I used in Physics I, II, III, Statics, Strengths, and Dynamics...

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[Dinosaur Neil]

"Throwing rocks" was an important part of the Lunar revolution in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the aliens in Niven and Pournelle's Footfall kicked off their invasion by dropping a not-quite-dinosaur-killer sized asteroid on Earth...

On a less fictional note, back in the 80's, there was a military project being debated called THOR which involved 10kg steel "needles" parked in orbit; when the time came, they would de-orbit and a minimalist guidance system would put them down on top of a tank or hardened bunker. Let's see; 10kg, call it 100km orbit, 9.8m/s^2, ~140s drop time, ~1400m/s on impact (little or no friction 'cause of their shape) restults in nearly 10mJ of kinetic energy colliding with your target. Ouch. Too bad the idea wasn't sexy or expensive enough for SDI...

agreed!

[Savage Henry Matisse]

Not to continue the OT fest, here, but I agree 100%. You're all acting like folks who throw a hissy fit in the restaurant because the cook has thrown a little parsley or kale on the edge of your plate. Just ignore the damned kale and go on with your meal. If the garnish really deserves this much attention, then maybe you should eat elsewhere-- 'cause it's pretty clear that the food here isn't doin' it for ya.

(Besides, I sorta liked playing around with the little car-- it was a nice distraction from my distraction from work. But I eat the parsley too, so go figure.)

2,900 miles != 4,700 miles

[LurkingWeasel]

Oops. I think that should read 4,700 kilometers

Re:I thought

[tve]

You mean you don't have those yet?

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[tve]

Note that you posted tomorrow.

Yesterday's Big Asteroid

[pnevares]

The asteroid people thought was going to kill us in 22 years may not after all: http://www.msnbc.com/news/319598.asp.

Darn. =)

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Technological progress is uneven

[Aero]

There really hasn't been any significant technological progress in space exploration since the early 1980s. Sure, probes are smaller and cheaper, but that's because the onboard computers are smaller and more powerful. Otherwise, the most advanced "spaceship" on the planet is little changed from when it was developed in the 1970s. That's right, the shuttle.

So what happened to the space program, in the US at least? With the technology that was available, it was getting prohibitively expensive to keep moving forward. The real benefits of the space program were being felt dirtside, especially the development of more powerful computers.

Computers happened. When computers became The Next Big Thing, and no significant progress was arising in space exploration (that little thing called the Challenger explosion didn't help), our priorities shifted. Now most of our engineering is focused on making the computers faster, smaller, and more powerful. Maybe in a couple generations of desktop computer, we'll be able to start taking space exploration seriously again. Maybe not.

I'd offer an analogy to a tech-advancing strategy game like Civ II, but it's late and it's time to hit the road.

Not Eros...

[Ravagin]

Oh gods...I remember some time ago reading, online, a prototype (is beta better word?) script for a film version of Ender's Game...it began with some military officers who clearly didn't get out enough getting ready to launch some attack from/on asteroid Eros...and they spent somthing like ten minutes chuckling over how everyone would call it "the erotic war" and such forth.
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"

Re:Completely Offtopic!

[cybercuzco]

no, im blaning the banner, and indirectly, slashdot for putting up the banner, and netscape for making such a crappy product. Maybe i should switch to IE ;-)

Re:Completely Offtopic!

[cybercuzco]

Just because somethings there doesn't mean you HAVE to click on it.

True, but it fills up netscape's memory and causes Navigator to crash. This is obviously not a nice thing to have happen, especially when your etryint to post. Granted, Slashdot readers are generally more techno saavy, and likely to be able to view a banner with java in it, but it wastes my bandwith and hurts my browsing experience.

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Winged Cat]

Well...perhaps a merge of the two? Stuff like declassifying, and removing any commercial restrictions on, no-longer-used military designs so that corporations (other than the Big Aerospace corps, which have shown no effective interest in this) can come up with working space vehicles without having to shell out quite as much for development? (Yeah, I know it's been done before for other areas; that's why I'm suggesting it here.)

There's platinum in them asteroids

[snorks]

Bring on the PEM fuel cells and say goodbye to the Black Blood of the Earth

Arcade Version ?

[Suit]

The arcade version was an instant classic !

The new 3D version looks a bit mediocre tho'

Manifest Destiny

[Suit]

Or doesn't anyone read Heinlein anymore ?

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Michael Woodhams]

What scares me is that I may live to see a time when no living person has set foot on another world. This would be a tremendous tragedy.

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[(void*)]

But in th 60s space exploration was largely Goverment funded. This cannot last in the long-term as Goverments change, and their budgets get reviewed.

It is still going to be a while for corporations to fund space exploration. For one thing, Corporations are even less farsighted than Governments (not that they are that far sighted, mind you.) They need immediate returns and that is just so hard to come by.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[Wigs]

It's noteworthy that an rock the size of, say, a small car, launched (dropped) from high orbit could and would hit the earth with enough force to generate atomic bomb scale destruction

Uh...sure. Well, that actually would make sense to do, but its practicality, please. First of all you would need to find an asteroid the size of a small car. True, you could probably fit a rock this size in the back of the space shuttle(maybe, I really have no idea if it would fit, but it seems reasonable). Well, considering a rock the size of a car would weigh in at several tons (again, it seems a reasonable enough estimate). Good luck geting a spacecraft up with that much weight attached.

Okay, say you did get it up there, or find a rock that big out in space. How the heck do you propose dropping it throught atmosphere without it burning up? To make much of an impact, you'd need an asteroid a little bigger than that. Good luck finding one out in space that you could some how coax into orbiting earth. Then you'd have to wait until it's orbit was just right so it would fall on the right target. Granted you wouldn't have to be very acurate, but we still have allies all over the planet, wouldn't want to hit them.

I guess this is an interesting thought, maybe even some far fetched science fiction. Really though, the next arms race?

Wigs

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[jonesvery]

"I guess this is an interesting though, maybe even some far fetches science fiction..."

Yep -- see The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

Re:ummmm a rock?

[el_guapo]

AH HAH!! I think I figured out the real value to this mission. Allow me to quote from the article "a cosmic potato twice the size of Manhattan Island" I've got it!!! Maybe they're trying to figure out how to DROP it on Manhattan Island!?!?

ummmm a rock?

[el_guapo]

ok - i am admittedly excited about this, and it seems that a lot of folks are as well BUT - aren't we getting pretty excited about basically orbiting a rock? anyone got some insight as to what kind of "deliverables" this research is expected to generate? i thought we were already pretty durn sure of the makeup of these things. don't get me wrong - if i were voting for this, i would definitely vote FOR it just because of its nerd-factor....

Benefits of Newton's third law

[link2NULL]

That's how it went in the book - one shot and the evidence disappears.

Gibson-esque

[link2NULL]

Did you read William Gibson's Count Zero? Put a railgun on a high-altitude ballon, aim it straight down, boom and no radiation or fallout.

Re:Gibson-esque

[/]

I haven't read it, but I'm assuming it would go something like: "And boom, no more balloon" -- by Newton's third law and without an incredible amount of wind resistance (which would be scarce at high altitudes), your high altitude balloon would probably explode from the sudden thrust. So you have one shot, assuming no one shoots your balloon down first.

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[chriscrick]

...Just an aside.

If you remember, the Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope was cut short specifically so that the astronauts would be safely on the ground when Y2K rolled around. The complete absence of humans in space on that date was entirely intentional.

Chris

Re:Oops! All Berries!

[YIAAL]

Living on a planet is so unsanitary -- all those people breathing the same air, drinking the same water, releasing dangerous nanodevices into a shared environment. Yuk.

Re:Oops! All Berries!

[YIAAL]

"If those Indies, or Americas, or whatever are full of gold it still won't be worth it to bring it back. And they're full of dangerous savages. Why spend all this money when it's so much easier and cheaper to invade Poland?" Anonymous European, 1493

Asteroids

[Teufel_Forelle]

Asteroid mining yes, but first they have to get there which hopefully will go a lot better than any of the Mars missions :)
This goes to show that when you look around you can find things and new discoveries (such as asteroid's).

"nmap (NT box ip) Difficulty:2 (Trivial Joke)"

Re:Completely Offtopic!

[GriffX]

Let's be honest now, this is only being moderated up because of how much all we geeks like your sig, Pi-boy...

Mining?!

[istartedi]

Hmm...now if they could just work out asteroid mining, we'd be doing fine.

No, now if we could just work out asteroid diversion, then we'd be fine. Keep those things away from me!

A message from above...

[ShelbyCobra]

NEAR is due to go into orbit around the micro-world Feb. 14.

Watch out for mass suicides by those who are spending this Valentines day alone, as this close passing of the Eros asteroid could be some sort of sign...

Here's the important issue

[tjstork]

Well, if we are on the inside of the earth, how come if we dig a hole, we don't fall out into space...? Would it be possible to let the air out of the earth if we drilled too deep...? Does a volcano really mean that we are in a bubble of MOLTEN MAGMA? Or, is simply the outside of the earth so hot from the sun that it melts a little bit... That might mean that we are some sort of candy center in God's oven... guess that means if we see giant teeth coming out of the ground, well, it's probably too late.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[tjstork]

Actually, a neat thing would be to build a sort of a super Trebuchet, with superalloy arms the size of skyscrapers, launching satellites into space.

Re:Oops! All Berries!

[tjstork]

1. You only need to get a ship into orbit to push the giant rocks of gold towards the earth, gravity does the rest. If you can drop the giant rock of gold on your corporate rival before he drops it on you, then you are so much better.

2. We do not have enough on earth. Speak for yourself. Space is so big we can be as greedy as we want. Everyone could have a 1000 acres of their own, if we go up.

3. Nobody really knows the composition of asteroids. The fluff thing is a theory. Actually, if an asteroid was made out of fluff, you would not need to mine it. You could wrap the dust in a big bag and take it back to earth.

4. Once up there, it takes very little mass to point your bag of gold ore towards the earth. Make sure the mass is not too big, let gravity do the rest.

5 & 6. The only reason we cannot terraform a planet is because we have not yet got the technology to be able to genetically engineer the bacteria that can convert hostile stuff into good stuff. Once we do that, we can launch a few tubs of that stuff to Venus and Mars, and let our genetically engineered "mother nature" do the rest.

7. Like what? Getting off of this junky old heap sounds like a good plan to me.

8. Depends on how much it costs. It certainly has a great deal of entertainment value. If it makes my taxes go up about $5, so much the better. Certainly better doing something feeding the poor.

9. If you don't like Tang, it means you are not dating the right kind of woman.

Re:BEWARE... I LIVE...

[Irritant]

http://onastick.net/drew/sinistar/index.html

miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[JudgePagLIVR]

It's noteworthy that an rock the size of, say, a small car, launched (dropped) from high orbit could and would hit the earth with enough force to generate atomic bomb scale destruction - only with no radiation. the next weapon of mass destruction perhaps?

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[JudgePagLIVR]

ah, but anti missile lasers are, at this moment, in violation of nuclear arms treaty.

At the same time, the fact that a missile can be shot down is all the more reason to graduate up to dropping asteroid bits - you can shoot'm a thousand times, all you do is spread the damage out.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[mafelda]

when was the last time the US military PRETENDED to pay attention to international treaty?

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[mafelda]

the is a shotty aproximation of the speed... acceleration do to grav in space is NOT 9.8 m/s nor is it 32 ft/s... (why does everyone here keep forgeting this?)

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[Bill Currie]

That's true, but at 100km altitude, it's still 9.5m/s^2. For back of the envelope calcs, G is basicly constant for that range, so just good old E=mgh is good enough. Hmm, 10kg*100000m*9.65m/s^2 (average accel) gives 9.65MJ. I don't think I want to be hit by that.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[Graymalkin]

Even if the stell balls don't have the energy to explode when they impact they do have the energy to go right through most structures. A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State building would go right through someone's body. It would be for the most part a psychological weapon, a rain of high velocity steel pellets would mutilate a city.

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[orcrist]

or Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A classic space invasion story if there ever was one, and you can always count on Niven for very exact science.

Chris

Re:miltary asteroid use - the next arms race.

[SEWilco]

You can see THOR in action in the "David's Sling", along with the first information war. You can buy the book but I noticed a reference that it might have also been in Hypercard. Anyone know more about the electronic form? If I buy a copy, is there a Linux viewer?

Re:Oops! All Berries!

[adrian_hon]

1) Sigh. Of course launch costs are going to come down. And have you ever considered the possibility of actually *using* the raw materials on the asteroid to produce crude cargo pods in situ? I'd remind you of the recent work done on the inflatable parachute/spacecraft, which essentially means you can *throw* something back down to Earth.

If you launch mining apparatus up to an asteroid, that would negate the need for constant 'shuttle' launches.

2) "Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly." I need not tell you that this sentence doesn't make any sense.

The entire *point* of asteroid mining is that the cost for mining and delivering the materials to Earth or Earth orbit is *cheaper* than what it is now. Do you really think NASA and SpaceDev would even bother researching this if they thought they couldn't make it cheaper? Come on.

3) Would you care to cite some academic papers on this subject? Most asteroids are fluff or crap, and have nowhere to land? Why not tell NASDA or SpaceDev this stunning piece of insight, so they won't have to waste their money on trying to land on an asteroid and mine it.

Of course we know that asteroids have useful materials. We can analyse their composition via careful inspection of wavelengths of light from the asteroid, and we can approximate their mass and density from their motion. Don't make statements you can't back up.

4) Carbonaceous chondrites (I don't suppose you'd know what they are? No) are full of organic materials, water and 'other stuff like that'. Plenty of material to burn for energy. Take up a small nuclear generator or some solar panels, and you're away. There are ideas for using mirrors and solar panels to concentrate solar energy into a single spot for smelting.

5) Outer space settlements are not a solution for overpopulation. But I'm sure people from those crank organisations like NASA, ESA, the Planetary Society and the Mars Society would have words with your claim that 100k will never live off Earth in the next century. 'Apparently' these organisations have people called scientists in them.

6) Why bother going to America? We've got plenty of space where we are in Europe, and it's too difficult to sail across the Atlantic. In fact, why bother coming down from the trees in the first place? It's so much of a bother.

7) Like what? Would you like telling that statement to NASA and Russian astronauts, that they're just Stupid Human Tricks?

8) Yes, it is a valid method of discussion to use arguments without substantiating them. Please go to www.marssociety.org if you want some informed opinion on why we should go to Mars.

9) How on Earth did this get message moderated up to 2?

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[mafelda]

SEWilco is right... if you wanna build a
inter-plaitary/setller craft (or any other large non-terestrial object for that matter), you dont build it planet side... it takes to much gas to get it into orbit. you build it in space, useing the prevelint resorces there. And it relly dosent take any massive equipment either: useing robots (as colleceters and builders), a reactor for power, and a automated smelter, it becomes relitivly cheap. the best part is a few robots can be programed to make more... cousing the building capibility to increse exponentionly, without expontial cost increse!

Shuttle launch for $20M

[Once&FutureRocketman]

Not a chance. Not even close. Try $400,000,000

Or more, depending on how you cook the books (e.g. do you try to amortize the R&D cost, like you would for a commercial venture? That is not included in the number quoted above)

Space Access does NOT have to cost a fortune

[Once&FutureRocketman]

It's late and I have to work tomorrow, so I'm going to confine myself to addressing the most relevant issue that you raised: the cost of launch.

You are correct: Getting into space IS prohibitively expensive. The going rate is around $5000/pound to Low Earth Orbit on the cheapest (Russian) ride available. If you want to fly the Shuttle, you're looking at more like $10000+/pound. And you are also correct in your assumption that we cannot do anything that makes sense in space until we get the cost to orbit down.

BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!! Your belief that space access is inherently expensive is a common misperception, which has been propagated and supported at every opportunity by NASA and the companies that feed off their largess.
The technical problems are hard, do not misunderstand me, but the primary challenges and limitations are organizational, political, and operational in nature, not technical.
NASA is a hidebound bureaucracy; they have no motivation to be cheap and efficient.
The shuttle requires ground support by tens of thousands of people between every launch. No wonder it is expensive.
Since the end of Apollo, NASA has repeatedly and consistently selected the launch system development programs that are least likely to produce results.

For a good summary of why we must go to space, and how NASA has worked to make that impossible, go to the latest report from the Space Access Society.

As long as I am getting up on this soapbox, let me establish my credentials: I have worked for NASA (at JPL) and I have worked on a launch vehicle development program. A privately funded launch vehicle development program. The company in question, the Rotary Rocket Company, is now effectively out of business for lack of funding. But in two years we built and tested four new rocket engine designs, while spending less than $2,000,000. Compare that to any program run by NASA, and you will understand why they have consistently failed to produce a reasonable launch vehicle.
We can develop the technology RIGHT NOW that would put us in orbit for 1/10 what NASA has to spend. And once space began to be commercialized in a big way, that cost would drop by another order of magnitude in less than a decade. All we need is the development money, and not very bloody much of it at that.
Come on, all you dotcom millionaires who grew up loving Star Trek. Do you want to live the dream? Then let's make it happen!

I welcome replies posted here, or to brent@lorax.org.

Tha isn't me either!

[_Bruce Perens]

Notice the lack of a preceding "_". Remember, only the one and only true _Bruce Perens has a "_"!

_Bruce

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[torpor]

Yup. I'm constantly harping on about how we're supposed to have Moon bases and hotels in space, and missions to mars by around about this time.

Pisses me off that we've not moved ahead with that, but hey, I guess we have better things to worry about as a species...

Still, these asteroid adventures seem pretty nifty. If only we'd get heavy industry involved in space expansion, and start putting all our massively destructive industrial manufacturing in space or on one of these asteroids, it seems like we might actually make some progress.

I guess the gravity well is bigger than our ability to overcome it right now, alas ...

Good point, railroads ... railroads ...

[torpor]

Good points, all true.

I guess we're just not ready, politically and socially.

Some of us are, probably, but I fear thats only because we're not really facing up to whats in front of us, socially, politically, and technologically, as a species.

I mean, sure, if there were a cheap way to do it I'm sure there'd be a massive exodus to space by those in our society who'd like to do things they can't do on Earth, but that's a long ways off, I'm sure.

Asteroid mining and so on.

[paul.dunne]

Ah, yes, asteroid mining. Does any else remember being a kid and thinking, "hey, in 2000, we're sure to have Moon bases and Mars bases and be mining the asteroids and...". And now here it is, the year 2000, and we don't even have a proper space station yet. Little missions like this are fine, but isn't it still terribly disappointing that the space race lost most of its momentum after Apollo?

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Tau Zero]

Yup. I'm constantly harping on about how we're supposed to have Moon bases and hotels in space, and missions to mars by around about this time.

"People build railroads when it's railroad time." Maybe it's not Mars time yet.

I guess the gravity well is bigger than our ability to overcome it right now, alas ...

Let me rephrase that for you: the gravity well is bigger than our need to get people out of it right now. In the 1960's, we had a need to do something big in space. It was a competition with the Russians designed to build national prestige among other nations and keep more countries from defecting to the Communist bloc. We could have had satellites in the 50's, but Von Braun was told "no" by his superiors. We didn't get them until it became a dick-size contest, and we didn't let anyone forget that we bailed Europe AND the USSR out a mere 20 years earlier: our dick really WAS bigger. And once we'd proved it, we took our bat and glove and went home.

Today we have tons of space going on, but national prestige is pretty much out of the picture. It's mostly in the things that pay in the medium of commerce, the greenback. Communications satellites produce revenues in the billions of dollars per year and are definitely worth fighting 5/6 of the way out of Earth's gravity well. We have no similar push to explore the Moon or Mars or return resources from asteroids because there's no profit in it. Space science is science, worth a few billion dollars a year worldwide, otherwise not that big of a deal. The largest manned-space project going today is actually a form of foreign aid and constructive bribery to keep the former USSR from letting its rocket and nuclear scientists go to places like Iraq or North Korea.

When it's railroad time, people will build railroads. What would make it Moon time, or Mars time, or 1992 KD time? Something that would make it pay. Most everything on Earth is far too cheap to be worth going to space to get more. It would certainly be cheaper to get large quantities of iron or oxygen from somewhere in space to ship them to Earth orbit than to launch them up, but there is as yet no market for bulk commodities in orbit to justify the expense of the first mining venture. It is a chicken/egg problem, looking for someone with a clever enough idea to bootstrap it.
--

Re:Asteroid mining and so on.

[Crixus]

Little missions like this are fine, but isn't it still terribly disappointing that the space race lost most of its momentum after Apollo?

Yes. :-)

More Headaches for Brian Marsden though...

[szyzyg]

Oddly enough - during this rather eventful wekk we've had Brian Marsden as a guest at the Observatory. In case you don;t know - Brian is the man in charge of cataloging all the asteroid observations and determining orbits.

He also decides who the discoverer is and therefore who gets naming rights (so of course I spent the whole time being very nice to him in the hope that I'd get an asteroid 'Manley').

Currnetly there are observations of almost 60,000 objects so it's going to become quite difficult to come up with names.

And now NASA is confounding his problem by taking close up photos of Eros - these photos have craters - and there's now a competition to come up with names for the craters.....

ho hum

Meanwhile, in another corner of the space race...

[MAXOMENOS]

Russian authorities have tested a reusable space vehicle, at a fraction of the cost of a Shuttle, and the tests were highly successful. The only problem is, they can't find it.

Read the story here.

I thought

[Dast]

by 2000, we'd all have personal jet packs and be wearing silver suits with a black V on the front.

I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed.

Re:I thought

[ralphclark]

Dang! So that's where my other slipper went!

Just wait till I get a-hold of that dog...

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Re:I thought

[Wah]

You mean you don't have those yet

He's prolly from Europe, I heard they haven't even been to the moon yet...

*retreats into Y2K shelter*

Completely Offtopic!

[FigWig]

I hate to be an asshole and abuse my +1, but a horrible Java banner appeared ad on slashdot! It was for Jane's IT and wanted you to move a car around or something. I usually browse with junkbuster, but I decided to use a windows box for a few seconds, and this is the shock I get!

Slashdot/Andover gets bought by VA Linux, and a few days later Java banner ads appear. Coincidence? I think not.

Asteroid mining...

[Graymalkin]

while controversial because people envision asteroids raining down on us like in so many movies is a very viable solution to the problems of raw resources. Lets saw we push a 500m (thats cubic meters and is pretty small compared to Ceres or Pallas) asteroid into the Earth or Moon's orbit for mining, there are many tons of raw materials just sitting there. Lets say it was a rocky asteroid (95% silicates) it could be ground up and used for any number of materials. Silicon structures (aerogel) are very light and very strong and would be easy to make from raw silicon. An iron cored asteroid would give us oodletons of ultra high quality steel, the metal would form a prime crystalize structure in microgravity and be about 5 times stronger than theb est steel made here on Earth, not to mention its production would be virtually pollution free. Besides raw material a hollowed out asteroid would make a really nice shell for a space station since the layer of rock would absorb a good deal of the solar radiation humans don't particularly like and provide a prefab superstructure. Once the infrastructure for space-mining is in place it will provide a very clean and very profitable business. The Sun spits out plenty of energy to use for smelting, factory power, material reclamation, ect. And for those Deep Impact fearing folk, we could set up specific zones for certain size asteroids, big ones wouldn't be allowed in certain orbits.

Another view.

[Shoeboy]

There's a great article on the hazards of asteroid exploration here
--Shoeboy

The Art of Falling

[StaticLimit]

There was an excellent Wired article about this subject that talks about NEAR's mission director Bob Farquhar, his expertise at using unique orbits to slingshot objects, and his habit of scheduling mission events to coincide with interesting dates.

The rendevous was initially scheduled for a different date. "January 10, 1999, the day the spacecraft was due at Eros, was the fifth anniversary of his civil marriage to his second wife, Irina."

It's a very interesting read!

- StaticLimit

Well, ok then

[/]

"No one has ever orbited a small body in space," he said. "The orbital stability is rather tenuous, and as we travel around Eros our navigation maneuvers must be perfect to keep us from crashing into it."

Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?

The spacecraft and the asteroid are both roughly 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth -- and experts emphasize that there's absolutely no danger that Eros will collide with our planet, at least for the next few million years or so.

Why such emphasis? What are they trying to hide? Big deal, so Eros isn't an Armor or Apollo asteroid. Hey, wait a second: Apollo + NASA == conspiracy, right? Wait 'til I let my friends in on this one.

On a more serious note, I've been waiting for the NEAR for a couple years now. We know all about the chemical composition of most of our planets, but before now, we never knew as much about asteroids, even though there're so many more of them (and there's a much greater chance that one of them will show up at our front door with a pointy reckoning than there is for something like Venus). A kudos to NASA if they pull this one off. As Congress is currently hammering out the new budget, NASA can't afford to mess this one up.

Re:Well, ok then

[Crixus]

Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?

An orbit like this, around an irregularly shaped object is very difficult due to different concentrations of mass.

Even our moon, though more regularly shaped, makes stable orbits impossible. We discovered MASSCONS (mass concentrations) in the 1960's and didn't actually have a good map of them until the recent CLEMENTINE mission.

Orbitting the moon requires regular orbital corrections, else you become crater ejecta.

:-)

Signal latency

[chazR]

distance (in miles)=136000000
distance(in metres)=136000000 * 1609
c=300000000 m/s
=> time (in s) ~= 720

So, this interaction will take place 12 light minutes away. Allowing for errors, let's say 1/2 an hour round-trip time for signals. OK, the orbital time will be pretty low, but it's still a serious challenge.

If they land this thing on, with a signal latency like that, can NASA have their budget back please?

Faster. Cheaper. Better. Pick any two.

Units, and distance from Eros

[Mr. Slippery]

On Tuesday, the 18.3-foot-wide (5.6-meter-wide) spacecraft was less than 2,900 miles (4,700 miles) away from Eros...

Insert joke(units_conversion,Mars,NASA) here.

I don't even want to talk about how far away from Eros I am right now.

Asteroid mining? mmmm, elite!

[rogerbo]

Marginally on topic... asteroid mining, elite, frontier, open source, elite open source code... ok give me some points for trying.

For anyone who fondly remembers elite and might not have heard of recent developments.

Frontier developments is now working on Elite 4 and there is a plan to make the full source of the original elite games open in a limited fashion.

see here: http://www.frontier.co.uk/eliteclub.html

Also, the BBC source code was posted unofficially to the net and is available here:

http://home.clara.net/cjpinder/elite.html

Oh yeah, in elite 3 you could go into orbit round asteroids and even land on them.

See it is on topic after all...

Oh, the rocks would get there all right.

[Tau Zero]

Okay, say you did get it up there, or find a rock that big out in space. How the heck do you propose dropping it throught atmosphere without it burning up?

Um, maybe you let it fall by itself? Fist-sized rocks fall to Earth all the time with no more damage than a thin "fusion crust" melted on one side. Somewhat larger rocks hit the ground at considerable speed. A rock the size of a car, sent down more or less vertically, would arrive largely intact and at hypersonic speed. THAT would be quite a weapon; even falling at a mere 5 miles per second, it would cover the last 50 miles (including all the significant atmosphere) in a just ten seconds.
--

Re:Oh, the rocks would get there all right.

[Ferzerp]

LOL, this thread kills me. Ok, you are forgetting a *huge* thing. If you are dropping it, that is allowing the rock to fall on its own it will only reach falling speeds. Now, what's the terminal velocity for something like a big rock? Do I know? Know... But I do know it is nothing at all like 5 miles a second... Asteroids cause problems because they are travelling at *immense* speeds. They go so fast that the slow down that the atmosphere causes is insignificant. But dropping something from an initial speed of 0? Of even shooting it as fast as we can? Umm...... NO. It's not the size of these things, it's the obscene speed relative to the Earth. Perhaps next time before suggesting something like this, actually consider the physics. 5 miles a second..... From dropping? That far out in space relying on the Earth's wimpy gravity at that distance? No. Someone out there more motivated than I do the math, and account for air resistance... Hmm, quick calculation shows that to attain 5 Mps from falling *using the acceleration at the surface of the earth* would require falling 462.5 miles. Yeah, this is a useless calculation b/c it is done only on the surface, but still it gives an idea....

Second pet peeve: /.'ers who can't do physics. ;)

[Tau Zero]

The speed you need to get into Earth orbit is roughly 5 miles per second; dropping something in from the Shuttle, as someone suggested, wouldn't start it any slower. (It wouldn't start vertically, but that wasn't my assumption.)

An object falling to Earth from infinity will be moving quite a bit faster, at a minimum of 7 miles per second. Oh, your math is wrong. At constant acceleration, v^2 = 2*a*d. With v = 8000 m/sec and a = 9.81 m/sec^2, d = 8000^2/(2*9.81) = 3.26e6 meters = 2027 miles. Of course, the acceleration isn't constant, it falls off as the inverse square of distance. Are you up to doing the integral of G*M(earth)/r^2 from r=4000 miles to infinity? You might find it illuminating.
--

BEWARE... I LIVE...

[AugstWest]

Anyone who is even thinking of mining asteroids has never felt the wrath of Sinistar.

He hungers....

Re:Second pet peeve: /.'ers who can't do physics.

[Ferzerp]

Well, if we are getting technical here then.
"Dropping" it would just put it into Earth orbit as well....

Feb. 14th

[Denor]

Dang - just when you think your valentine's day couldn't get any worse, you find out that a lifeless asteroid and a hunk of metal with a camera attatched are both getting more action than you are....

Happy 14th to those wacky lovebirds up there!

Asteroid mining

[Dirtside]

If you're interested in asteroid mining and space habitation (specifically, a good deal of research and writing that's been done on the subject), check out PERMANENT, the Projects to Employ Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term. They've got a great deal of information on proposed ideas as well as research that's already been done into this field.

Here's another thing I fear... if, as proposed, they try to come within a mile of the asteroid with NEAR -- something that has never been attempted before -- and they crash, people will again bitch as NASA for failing. *sigh*

Let's Abolish English Measurements

[friedo]

On Tuesday, the 18.3-foot-wide (5.6-meter-wide) spacecraft was less than 2,900 miles (4,700 miles) away from Eros, and fired its engines for the final course correction before orbital insertion.

'Nuff said.

Oops! All Berries!

[Jikes]

Sorry to disturb the geekstravaganza over "Mining Asteroids" and "Space Living", but someone has to do it.

Problems:

1) If huge bales of pure gold metal were floating in orbit and all you had to do was open the shuttle doors and scoop it up with rakes, it would still come nowhere near offsetting the cost of a shuttle launch. Or the next generation of "cheap" vehicle launches. Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.

2) We have most of everything we want on earth. Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly. Some more platinum might be nice because there's not really enough to meet potential demand, but oh well.

3) Many/most asteroids are made of fluff, crap, and dust. They are not rocks. They are not mine-able, and they do not offer a place to land.

4) Where's the fuel going to come from to smelt these bad boys? Certainly we're not going to be hauling ore to and from earth?

5) Anyone who believes significant (100k+) populations will exist off-earth within the next century is delusional. Delusional squared if they think space colonization is a solution to population growth. Period.

6) Why bother? Earth is enormous. Space is difficult to make habitable.

7) There is far more interesting science that can be funded with the cash we blow on NASA Stupid Human Tricks.

8) Sending people to Mars is a pure unadulterated tremendous waste of money. Just like the Space Station under construction. Too bad Texan Congressmen and professional corporate cocksuckers don't agree.

9) Tang sucks. Even the new stuff.

10) I bent my wookie!

Toodles!