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On Asteroid Mining
There's an article out in Feed Magazine that pans the Space Station, but then gets into some actually interesting matter, like the increasing ability to actually do asteroid mining. Asteroid mining has long been a staple of hard science fiction, but the benefits of being able to /really/ do it are immense - less pollution, really clean metals. There's just that nasty get-the-material to the factory issue. But that's why we need a space elevator, right?
And when you hear 'Beware, I live', then run coward, run.
A man returning from the world's first Bar Mitzva on an asteroid seemed disappointed.
"What's wrong?" asked his friend, "the band was no good?"
"The band was very good," he answered.
"The food was no good?" asked his friend.
"Out of this world!"
"Nu! So, what was the problem?" asked his friend.
"There was no atmosphere."
Why be so delicate? It's metal for crying out loud. Make ingots, encase them in an ablative silicon heat shield (so you don't loose your valuable iron to ablation) and go "ready, aim, fire...". Pick a spot - Arizona in the desert - paint a 20 mile X and have trucks waiting. :)
Mike
A serious questions... Once all those countries get to our level (which, I think is the ideal here), who's going to make those cheap tennis shoes? Are we going to automate everything and everyone is going to be designing computers? Doesn't our system NEED countries to exploit?
Its right next to the sky scraper made of popsicle sticks in Springfield.
Cool, we're that much closer to building the Enterprise in spacedock... Only without the shields... and the impulse drive... and the warp drive... and the teleporters... and the photon torpedos... and the aliens...
I think you mean "That's why we need a moon-based factory". Especially when it comes to refining raw materials . o O { metals } for building, say, spaceships, makes sense to do it all on the moon. Benefits of moon manufacturing include better welds and a lower energy-to-orbit factor.
"Give me liberty, or give me death, Zogwarg Queen!" - Spiff.
"Come on, most of us are programmers here--wouldn't it be more elegant, clean, efficient, if we could just work out a way to achieve near 100% renewability of resources we use here on Earth, and then use that nearly indefinitely?"
Well, yes it might but the second law of thermodynamics tends to interfere. All that platinum that is gathered in one place tends to be used all over the Earth. While we should gather it in to reuse some of it will disappear. Eventually we end up with materials uniformly spread everywhere, and it becomes impossible to resuse them.
They assumed the idea of discovering new territory was stealing gold and shipping it back to Spain.
The guys who really made the big bucks were the ones who decided to move to the New World and create wealth there.
Actually, the riches (it was mainly silver from Mexico and Peru) that weren't sunk or pirated passed frequently from the Spanish galleons to the convoys that brought them to the very wealthy German banker family Fugger. The king had mortgaged his share well in advance to wage wars all over Europe.
I wouldn't say that the English colonies were very rich before independence. Plantation economy and industrialization made them rich but I'm not an expert.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
1) Do complete geological survey of the moon to locate and quantify ice and mineral deposits.
2) Build lunar base(s), mining and refining plants, making maximum use of lunar materials.
3) Build spacecraft hulls with the refined metal, bringing electronics and (nuclear?) engines from Earth. The relatively low lunar gravity would make spacecraft launches practical (perhaps assisted by a catapult?), and larger crafts could be assembled in lunar orbit.
4) Go to Mars, go to the asteroid belt, leveraging the materials and technology gained on the moon.
5) Repeat indefinitely.
Concurrent with the latter steps, bring back rare materials to Earth to at least subsidize the costs. Perhaps construct "drop pods" (parachute drag, like the old Apollo capsules) for bulk material return?
The scary thing is, it sounds like the Chinese are following this path while America sits on its collective ass.
What will probly happen is a homesteading will be implemented. You claim a chunk, have to get there and stay there for so long. A good way to limit the typical amount of "paid homesteading" (where a person/corp/group pays people to homestead lots of plots for them) would be that your then liable for any damages your new "home" causes. You want KD-1997.23.A, sure, oh, and it's heading for the earth/mars/space station Andromeda. Correct its orbit or pay mondo fines.
Probly a mass limit too. Say, anything charon's mass or more. That's a really rough guess, it's been a long time since i read "Mining the Sky"
Also put a year abandonment clause in so ownership isn't in perpetuity.(sp?) But liability for damages still is. So you get people/corp deeding over stakes to National Park Services of Space.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
space elevator? bah, I want a space escalator. imagine *that*.
While these are nasty in this almost perfect biosphear when they get out of porpution with everything else its a Bad Thing.
The nasty things in space are already there, and anything thats alive in space is protected in a nice sealed ship, and consiquently wouldnt be affected.
It would probably make sense to build manufacturing plants either on the surface of the moon, or have them directly attached to any mining opperation on asteroids.
Besides, NASA may complain about space trash, but the space-space in orbit is significantly larger than the air-space over the US, and the FAA seems to be doing a somewhat OK job making sure planes dont smack into each other. (well, the system is falling appart from massive groth....) If NASA (or the UN) defined pattern for satelites, they could potentialy patroll those lanes removing bad things.
Either a space elevator or Heinlein's catapult/bombardment combo. You choose.
Flavio
Thought about that, but then you wind up breathing the slag. You need an engineered material that won't vaporize. Besides, the nickle/iron content isn't the interesting part -- you may be sending down much more volatile/fragile stuff.
The main risk is losing the heat shield and releasing your payload into the atmosphere, or accidentally hitting that trailer in Quazi. As long as all the construction materials come from Out There, it should be cheaper than the elevator.
What we really need the elevator for is moving people and/or materials up there to do the mining in the first place.
Hmmm...
"Strip" mines, resource "rape" by "Man"...
You don't get much, do you, Hairy?
P.S. - Anything capable of living in the deep cold and vacuum of the asteroid belt is unlikely to be bothered by us breaking up it's rock. It would probably just move. Or else turn us into gooey zombies and invade the Earth by proxy.
Hey, it could happen!...
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
Baxter, Stephen; Manifold: Time; ISBN:0006511821
Distance ?? Wrong question. The question you NEED to ask is time involved. . . .
Concentration ??? See Extraction. With enough power, you can extract ANYTHING. And there's that big yellow fusion reactor out there for a power source. . .
Fuel ??? Ever hear of a mass driver ??? The less-valuable portions of the asteroid can be used AS fuel. Slow, but steady accelleration. Which, in the long run, is FAR more efficient than a short, high-gee rocket burn. . .
You don't need to educate them specifically about reproduction, but there is a very strong correlation between level of education and reproductive rates. Better education generally does lead to lower rates of reproduction.
And the biggest problem with over-population isn't figuring out where to put the people, it's dealing with the increased use of natural resources and disposing of increasing quantities of waste.
I'm sorry, but all I can say to this is: bullshit. (OK, not the part about changing the governments, but...) If you think that capitalism cures hunger, OPEN YOUR EYES! Why do so many in the US live below the poverty line? Why has the poverty rate increased in Latin American countries as they adopt IMF-sponsored "free-market" reforms? Why are the lowest levels of hunger and poverty in western-european countries with strong welfare states?
OK -- I agree with you about the fusion stuff, so at least we agree about something!
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
How do define ownership? People, or rather NASA, seems to think that space is theirs. Sooner or later people will get out there. And then what? Have someone decide that they own Mars, or that asteroid, or anything.
This article talks about making/saving money up there, but that alone opens the door to tremendous conflict over ownership.
There's actually a multi-lateral treaty on the books re: ownership of objects in space. It's the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. The common title is the "Space Treaty." (There's a second treaty from 1979 that deals with the Moon exclusively.)
The Space Treaty says that no _states_ have sovreignity over celestial bodies (private parties are not considered by the treaty), and that outer space is "the province of all mankind," but adds that any vehicle or object launched from Earth into space remains in the sovereign control of the government that launched it.
The Moon Treaty, which was never ratified by the USA, specifically bans appropriation of lunar territory by private parties. The implication is that the earlier Space Treaty did not ban such appropriation of "celestial bodies."
The general impression that I get from the (little) literature that I've read on the subject (and, BTW, IANAL) is that space exploration will inherit a lot of law and tradition from ocean exploration, the other great frontier of the next century. There may someday have to be a United Nations commission that grants asteroid mining patents, much the same way the U.S. government granted/grants patents for claiming and mining federal land in the West.
What I suppose I'm trying to say is that when NASA, ASARCO, or whoever sends the first prototype mining vessels to near-Earth asteroids, they will find...lawyers.
What about the moon? Anything worth getting there?
Yes. Read the article. First paragraph of the section that starts "Figuring out how...."
Also, just hypothetically, what would happen if a private group or company landed on the moon and set up a perminent base. Would they own it?
The 1979 Moon Treaty bans private appropriation of lunar territory or materials. So no, probably not. The USA never ratified this treaty, though, so who knows what could happen?
I can't think of a single case in the history of civilisation of colonizing a piece of territory hasn't involved bloodshed. When australia was colonized they hunted down the native aborigines. When the USA was 'discovered' there was war with the native red indians (and oh yes, attempted religous conversion.) The colonization of South America by the spanish etc involved genocide (and oh yes attempted religous conversion). Slaves were brought from africa to the americas (and oh yes, attempted religous conversion.) The colonization of South Africa by europeans involved war as well as attempted genocide of the natives (and of course attempted religous conversion.) The middle east situation speaks for itself. This is just a tiny handful of examples. Genocide appears to be some sort of "normal" human behaviour. I can't think of one single case in history where the arrival of a new group of people resulted simply in peaceful coexistence with native peoples.
In fact, as far as I can tell, when humans discover ANY new place that has existing sentient living things on it, there are two things we do to those living things:
I wish that I could come up with some reason why it's going to be different when we start encountering alien races, but I can't ..
And you're several million kilometers away from any state's military after you seize control from the Company. And by gosh, you're looking down at them from the top of an immense gravity well, and you've got asteroids...
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
They'd still fit if you gave everyone a 10ftx10ftx10ft cubicle.
My highschool Physics Teacher (A physics Ph.D., whose husband runs the physics department at the local University) thinks that controlled Nuclear Fusion is a pipe dream. Not gonna happen (in any "profitable" way - by profitable, I mean you get more energy than you put in).
Of course, and everyone on the earth could be fit into the Grand Canyon. Of course, they'd all die, but isn't it a fascinating statistic!?!
This reminds me of one of those "tips" stories on The Onion, Helping Your Kids Succeed in School.
...
6) Develop a working model for a reformed educational system that addresses the needs of every child at a reasonable taxpayer cost. Then become powerful and implement that system.
Simple!
. . . a really big war. It'll help reduce overpopulation and it'll be good for the economy.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Point taken; nonetheless, I doubt I will live to see the truly nasty side effects of overpopulation.
Still, you never know.
--"You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can't make him think."
overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem
Ignore Malthus at your own risk.
Me, I'm not particularly in favor of plagues, famine, and war, but what the hell. I'll be dead in 100 years anyway.
--"You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can't make him think."
If the article's figure are correct, assuming two pounds of water costs about $300,000 to launch we get something over $9000 per ounce to launch
The article actually said:
At current launch prices, a day's worth of water for the four-person crew costs more than 300,000 dollars.
According to page 16 of this 28 MB document from NASA, an astronaut is allocated 5 lb of water per day for drinking and hygiene combined. $300000 / (5 lb * 4 astronauts) = $15,000 / lb.
Malthus thought there would be to many people for earth resources 50 years after he was writing, that was 150 years ago.
Spencer Ogden
Anybody can get there. Having "ownership" means you have a maintained presence and actively defend it. Once someone bonks you over the head and kicks you off the asteroid, you no longer own it. However, if you come back and do the same, then you can own it again.
That's why some people consider property and ownership to be a "burden."
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
ok, let's go over this again.
A company wants to mine an asteroid. They have the resources to launch a spacecraft and perform the task. The company goes on with it's plans. You want to mine the asteroid. You have no resources to launch a spacecraft and perform the task. You realize this, and go on with your life.
The company has full right to mine as much as they want to. I reiterate, they aren't taking anything away from you!
How is it that a company is stealing when they are doing something that is completely out of your reach? In order to take something away from you, you would have to possess that thing.
Space isn't possessed by anyone yet, and so it is open for the first person to get there. If a person lays claim to a space object, there has to be some way for them to realistically accomplish that claim. If they can't, they lose. And because space is outside the borders of any government, earth laws do not apply.
It isn't that complicated.
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Finders, Keepers.
If you're really worried about it, launch your own ship and do your own mining. If you have no plans to do that though, quite complaining. They aren't taking anything away from you. Get over it.
The end.
____
The earth is big and heavy, so all the really valuable heavy metals like gold, platinum, etc. tend to sink deep into the Earth so they end up being relatively rare on the crust. Most asteroids, however, are fairly homogeneous collections of the heavy material that made our solar system, so they are chock full of the valuable heavy metals. For instance in the case of Gold, meteorites have concentrations about 50 times greater than in the Earth's crust. I got this information from Webelements under the geology link for gold.
> Maybe you should whip out your calculator before you post.
:)
Er, what's so bad apout asking? Oh, well, at least you answered even if you did whine about it.
So, the mission will be called "Mohammed", 'cos the mountain isn't going to come to us
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
The problem of the environment is the "problem of the commons", it's everyone's property, but nobody's responsibility. While it's true that we need to protect the environment, having an active space program allows us to not have "all our eggs in one basket." (my, I'm a wealth of metaphores today).
Let's one forget one other thing we can "mine" in the asteroid belt: WATER. Water for space stations. Water for lunar colonies.
Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
stirring the pot since nineteen mumblty mumble
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
I thing those resource collectors are great. Just a big giant vacuum to pick up all those leftover minerals. (It's great to watch the "resources" actually shrink in size.)
Am I saying "don't use fusion", of course not, it's the logical step for mankind's future energy needs. But in the future, when someone mentions that fusion is a non-polluting energy source you can tell them its wrong.
Here's an old article that links to some info on the subject.
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Space is very nice for manufacturing certain applications. Taking refined metals and creating almost perfectly spherical bearings, or extremely delicate strands that couldn't be made on Earth.
However, traditional machining would not be easy. One of the items we take for granted when designing machining setups is gravity. We know the coolant fluid will sink to the bottom, as will the metal shavings. Up in orbit, if you don't create artificial gravity, you will have major problems with the residuals left over from manufacturing.
The moon would make a nice place to set up operations (since we wouldn't have to create gravity). Still, you'll have to boost them out of the gravity well.
I'm in favor of space-based manufacturing, but we're going to have to look at everything we do carefully to avoid any unpleasant side-effects.
What all could you get from an asteroid? Just facts or some nice raw materials?
Yes, you're missing something.
For instance, you apparently missed READING THE ARTICLE. In it, it states that (for example) a recently discovered Near Earth Orbit (NEO) asteroid that is only about 2 kilometers in size but "At today's prices, the iron and nickel alone would be worth about eight trillion dollars, cobalt another six trillion dollars, and the platinum-group metals about the same."
So yes, there is quite a bit of nice, usable raw material to be gained from extra-planetery mining. Not to mention that if you could build a "space refinery" you could build and manufacture ships & supplies right up there in zero-g, without having to waste fuel & resources getting them there.
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
Your ship produces a known thrust. It is easy to accurately measure accelleration. You can determine the total mass of your ship (or the net mass of your cargo if you know the unloaded mass of your ship) pretty easily.
That's why we need a space factory... Is gravity a requirement for processing metal?
The simple way to mine asteroids is to launch *MANY* direction altering nukes at the intended target and alter its course to make it SLAM into the moon. The heat from the impact will SMELT a lot of the ore for you, then you just go out in your moon buggy and pick up the metal, refine it and use it. Why does everyone overlook earth ORIGINAL and LONGEST LASTING SATELLITE?
Official GOD FAQ.
Oh yeah? Then how come I can't buy Space Food Sticks anymore? Answer that, wise guy.
Pete
We're just waiting until the rain forest gets smaller. That way it will cost a lot less to maintain.
Pete
It says the minerals are worth trillions at current market prices. That price is determined to a large degree by how there is available. If there suddenly was a lot more available the price would fall accordingly.
Pete
I think Hemos has been watching too much Armageddon :)
When are we sending Bruce to drill?
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So we should send our trash into space too?
*Foom* I don't wanna hear your stupid logic, Vulcans! Logic this *foom*.
*sigh* so much for First Contact...
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Gold and silver prices are at historical lows
for the past 10-20 years. Gold and silver mining
companies are just barely hanging on at these
prices.
I think it's ridiculous to speculate about
asteroid mining when metal prices are EXTREMELY
depressed here on earth. IMHO.
If and when asteroid mining becomes techinically feasable and reasonably cheap, why not have regulations subjecting mining on earth to the same social/environmental standards that asteroid mining can achieve? It would essentially cripple the earth-based mining industry, but with good reason: it's impact is greater than asteroid mining. It's my understanding that government regulations adapt to whatever the state of the art is, (i.e. after dynamite came out, laws were changed to reflect that advancement), and asteroid mining would definitly be the state of the art.
just my 2..
Why don't you put yourself off food for the next year to help us all out? No? Then why ask 2 billion people to die while you eat your pizza-with-5-toppings? The answer to overpopulation isn't to let people that are alive today die, but to actively feed _and_ educate _and_ give economic opportunity to them. Ever wonder why some poor families have more childern (and this isn't just today; the precious usa had a much higher birthrate not too long ago)? Because if you're poor, if you live an a rural area, you need your childern to help you and each other in order to survive. There's no two ways about it. Either you have lots of children, or you _and_ your childern die. It's pretty fucking callous to write off 2 000 000 000 people in order to save 10 seconds worth of brain cycles. Pretty fucking callous - moreso as a joke.
Didn't Robert Malthus Say this 200 years ago?
What about the moon? Anything worth getting there?
Also, just hypothetically, what would happen if a private group or company landed on the moon and set up a perminent base. Would they own it?
While SDI was never a really workable concept, some very nice technology was created for it. A lot of research was done on practical rail guns. A rail gun system big enough to put 1000 kg freight payloads into orbit would cost billions of dollars. It would get the cost of getting hardware to orbit to tens of dollars a pound instead of $10K per pound. This opens up the Solar System.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Imagine picking up a shovel and mine on a Death Star ;) ;)
Seriously, isnt it a bit expensive to mine on an Asteroid ?
Well, maybe those elevators make it cheaper
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
The real benefits of asteroid mining will be to make self-replicating cities in space. These will allow a diversity of human-derived cultures to flourish.
What will be of value in the space frontier is using the energy from the sun and matter from the asteroids to build space cities or space habitats. These will provide homes for trillions of ideas. The wealth that will flow back to Earth won't be material -- it will be spiritual (new dreams), intellectual (new designs), and political (peacemaking).
Such habitats will also provide a place for misfits to go -- as the American frontier was for a time -- letting the Earth settle down.
To create a space city that can self-replicate from asteroidal ore and sunlight will take a better understanding of manufacturing and how webs of manufacturing processes fit together.
Links: /sp acsetl.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Think back to real Star Trek and the horta, perhaps horta's live there and we;re about to destroy their habitat.
And believe me, you don't want PETH on your backs...
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Imagine how quickly and cheaply we could populate the orbits of both earth and the moon with stations for science and habitation if we didn't have the cost of tossing mass out of everyones favorite gravity well.
The ISS coming online made a splash among geeks and the press, but the day the first space metalurgy/refinery factory comes online will be a truely exciting day indeed.
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Rouge? IIRC, Asteroids was a black and white vector graphics game, how did they manage to get some red in there?
Damn, them Atari programmers must have been good....
Spin it, spray the insides with insulation, put up some dry wall and some nice drapes... home!
We have thousnads of years' worth of nuclear fuel. Nuclear energy is one of the cleanest we've got especially if you have a reprocessing plant that makes new fuel out of the waste. So don't worry about petrolium being used up. We have enough fuel to last us a VERY long time.
If anything it will be the same as earth. Depending on the size of the area being fought over, the person with the most fire power will win.
But then I don't think anyone has spent billions of dollars on that either. And we just spent 60 on another space station. I believe that this is relatively minor stuff that will be solved once some stupendous sum is thrown at it, and give some years.
We'll get it to work. It will be useful, regardless of its money value now we might need those asteroids for our energy supply, we need lots of rare materials for solar power, etc. Maybe it's impossible in the long run to do without them.
The big problem is getting it here, I think. It would be ironic if they decided to push one of those pebbles this way to orbit it, and some conversion error wiped out the earth....
Won't happen in 10 years though.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Strip mining asteroids would definitely have more of an environmental impact than tearing up a tiny redwood forest. I'm just wondering how these topless ladies are going to hug the rocks in question without pressure suits...
Midwatch Industries
If I recall correctly, getting something from orbit to splashdown really only requires a heatshield and a parachute -- no need for a launch mechanism and tons and tons of fuel, right? Assuming requisite materials are present on the asteroid(s), why couldn't an appropriate heat shield be constructed en site for the transport? If you're using the materials in orbit, then you don't even need to worry about _that_ -- throw a (large) pellet into an appropriate orbit, catch it, and voilla.. or heck, use a mobile factory to build components on site at the asteroid..
..I'm rambling..
To sum -- use the materials in orbit, and you don't need to worry about the costs you're worrying about. If you can build drop-transports of some sort from orbit, then you don't have to have a transport launched from earth..
It doesn't sound like as much of a financial nightmare as you're saying.. (though I'm not about to boldly state that it's a wonderful idea to drop-transport raw iron)
Agreed that we need the ISS, though. It's a step in the right direction..
lol, some guy already has it covered. he went down to the local san fransico land & title office and laid claim to all other 8 planets in one fell swoop. you can now buy i think 1/2 mi x 1/2 mi plots of mars and the moon for 20$. search for "buy mars" or "unusual gifts" on google.com or the likes. oh yeah, and a week later he went back and registered for all the asteroids in the milky way. i shit you not.
moox. for a new generation.
of course we should send it into space!....at $10,000 a pound (currrently).
/. and there are enough stories posted each week to warrant it. and then post it for download on a slashdot ftp in divix format. ok i'm done bsing, goodnight.
did you ever see that episode of futurama where they do launch that big ball of trash into space about 200 years ago (which really is some time in the future, b/c the show is set more than 200 years in the future), anyways, it all comes back, armegeddon style, and they shoot it down, or make it be not as bad, also, armegeddon style. they should remove the copyright on armegeddon already, people make enough references about it daily on
moox. for a new generation.
so, like, what you're saying is, like, there's big balls of expensive stuff floating around out..."there"? swanktastic. i call dibs on the big one!
yep, so now that we've decided mining these things is a good thing, we've got to somehow figure out how to land a satilite on there to figure out what kind of minig apparatus we want to send to which asteroid (gold miner to a particularly gold-enriched asteroid, ect). To date, we've sent ONE satilite to an asteroid; the largest one we know of. When someone lands somthing on one of these smaller asteroids, wake me.
moox. for a new generation.
what the hell is a "platinum group" metal? are we talking inert/non-reactive metals?
moox. for a new generation.
And be sure to watch out for those rouge UFO's that come in from the right side of the screen.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Here's one most seem to have overlooked: The Earth's mass is pretty much a constant value, give or take the few hundred tons which now orbit the earth as sattelites, etc. So, if you start bringing in asteroid after asteroid of material, wouldn't it start making the earth 'heavier'? Would this affect gravity after a while? If it affected gravity how about things in orbit? The moon? What about our own orbit around the sun? Maybe we should just keep it in space and build big ships from moons and stuff (like the Marathon...remember? :-) )
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
FUD, plain and simple. There are exercises you can do in zero/microgravity, and it's quite possible that people will end up sleeping in centrifuges. It also seems likely that large rotating areas will become the norm, especially on asteroid-anchored stations, because people are used to having a gravitied place to work. Metalworking is much more predictable when shavings want to fall down.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uh, no. Platinum is worth more along the lines of $500 an ounce. Still, if it costs $9000 an ounce to bring this back to Earth, there is no way prices would be competitive, unless we came up with a much more efficent way of transporting the goods. If anyone here has read 3001, the elevators were quite the idea, and the thing is that they would be feasible in the not too distant future. Probably not in any of our lifetimes, but I can see it happening in 200-300 years, minus the fast accelerating without any G-Forces part (But that wouldn't matter if you transporting raw materials much if they were packaged correctly anyway)
The bottom line is that mining asteroids is a feasible thing to do, but I don't see it happening untill the 23rd century or so in an efficent manner. We need a lot more technology to be able to get a manufacturing plant to the asteroid, then we have to build it and make robots that will do everything one way or another, and then we will need a semi-efficent way of transporting it back, to the point that costs are decent enough that people/companies will be able to afford them.
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
And it's going to be a lot of money.
If the only problem they have is logistics (which the article seems to imply) then that'll be solved. Maybe not in five years but someone will figure it out.
And when being in space becomes profitable we're going to see a huge boom both in flights and a continuing presence.
Why is it expensive? Getting up there in the first place, yes. But once you're on the asteroid, it's not like you have to dig much for the metals; they're just sitting right there. To melt them you can focus a bunch of mirrors on it and let the sun do the work. And getting them back to earth? Dropping stuff down a gravity well is about ten thousand times easier and cheaper than getting stuff out of it.
And why isn't there a bloated government agency with delusions of adequacy (is there any other kind?) studying the ocean depths or the rain forests? Gee, tough question... For starters, operating costs are rather a lot less, so corporations and rich individuals can pay for it. And yes, space is sexy. Politically useful? As a scapegoat, maybe.
But you're missing the point. We don't want NASA to pioneer the conquest of space. If they did, it'd take them another thousand years to establish a lunar base. They are on record as saying they intend to use the shuttles for another 20 or 30 years. Can you imagine Intel being granted a government monopoly and then saying that the 8086 was a perfectly good chip and that they're not gonna bother making any new ones for another forty years?
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Dyolf Knip
Hello, you're an idiot? There are plenty of asteroids that aren't in the Belt. Some of them cross earth's orbit all the time. Move one into orbit and your distance problem all but goes away. 3 AU's? Try 3000 km, with gravity doing all the work of getting it down here. Who the hell moderated this moron up?
What's naive is assuming that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Don't you think that people with significantly more intelligence than you have been thinking about problems like these for some time now? Try actually reading up on the subject before you declare yourself an expert.
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Dyolf Knip
Why? Because of the space elevator bit? That idea is a tad older than SMAC, I assure you.
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Dyolf Knip
You want no pollution or garbage? Geez, mankind has been polluting its environment since before we became sentient, just like every single other organism on the planet for its entire history. This atmosphere you hold so dear to your heart is largely pollution from photosynthesis and various other chemical reactions. Should we do something about our excesses? Yes, but certainly not by killing off all our industries.
You want no shortages? You're not going to get that by slapping an upper limit on the amount of resources we can have in circulation at any given time. You'll notice that money fits this pattern fairly well. Now think carefully before you answer this: are there people who have a shortage of money? I'll give you a hint: the correct answer begins with a 'Y'.
Look, utopias where everyone's desires are fulfilled through the happy interaction of happy people with happy intentions working happily towards happy goals using only happy technology while living out happy lives with their happy families on a happy planet are all well and good. But for the love of god don't waste space on /. servers by asking why they aren't already here.
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Dyolf Knip
True, but it's not as if an entire asteroid's worth of metals is going to be dumped onto the market overnight. It'll take a while to get price levels down to ridiculous levels (ie, gold and platinum for the same price as tin), during which the demand for these materials will go even higher.
Also if the metals could be recovered and transported cheaply enough you could look to see even more mining companies going bust
Why does everyone see new technologies putting old industries out of work as a Bad Thing? When automobiles first became popular, did the horse-raising industry cry out to the government "No, you can't allow this! We'll go out of business!" How about commuter airplanes vs airships? The Pony express vs telegrams? Telegrams vs telephones? Telephones vs voice over IP? The RIAA and MPAA vs the Internet? Well on the last two, yes, but why should the they be allowed to do things the inefficient Old way at the expense of the much better New? I say, fuck em. If they can't adapt, they deserve to go under.
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Dyolf Knip
However, the required delta-v is a good point, but easily solved: move the asteroid into orbit. Then just extract the stuff and kick it down to earth. But then you have problems with all the stupid people who have seen Armagaeddon and will think that it's the end of the world when that second moon (cool!) shows up.
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Dyolf Knip
For any suitably sized asteroid, you could first mine most of the core for valuable minerals, and on the surface build various support structures such as a foundry, launch facility, etc. :)
Leave enough material in the surface to keep it stable, you could then convert the hollowed out core into habitats. The asteroid belt could hold more population than the entire surface of the earth.
A similar idea could be applied to the moon, which would become an important harbor between the Earth and "the Belt". Another harbor area to explore would be Mars' moons Deimos and Phobos.
Lastly, Given Mercury's size and location, it would make an excellent location for a solar power generation facility, made from locally available materials. Any ideas on how to get the power of the planet?
I'll stop now
...but the technology has to develop a lot farter to make it economical.
That mistake is just too easy to make fun of! Haha.
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Asteroid's aren't in orbit around the earth. They're in orbit around the sun.
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Find free books.
The energy goes into (1) frictional heating, (2) kinetic energy, and (3) gravitational potential energy. If by "fighting gravity" you mean #3, you're just factually wrong. If you were right, a space elevator wouldn't even be energetically preferable to a rocket. #1 and #2 are the only significant costs if you're going to low-earth orbit, which is the current challenge. Whether #1 or #2 is the main cost depends somewhat on what path you take out of the atmosphere and your pattern of acceleration, but for current designs #1 is the main cost. If you're going out of Earth's gravity well completely, then #2 and #3 are numerically equal. (This is called the virial theorem.)
the fuel could be produced from there rather than lifting it to orbit.
Rocket fuel is typically oxygen and hydrogen. The moon and asteroids are extremely poor in hydrogen.
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Find free books.
God, that game was scary. It was like asteroids on acid. You pump something like twenty thousand rounds into an asteroid and get out a few drifting sparklies that you have to pick up to make the bombs, which were the only thing that could really hurt the sadistic flying skull-face demon from Hell.. after a while he shows up to chase you around. And he doesn't /stop/ chasing you. If you don't have enough bombs, you just have to make 'em fast, before catches up with you.
What was that evil fucker called?
God, I feel /old/.
-Jon, who sits on the front porch now and whittles.
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Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
nt
all your base may never have existed at all
By increasing female literacy, you help people economically and you help them decide their own birth control strategy.
I agree with this, and if this is the point the original poster was trying to make, I agree with that, too. However, I interpreted his statement as "we need to educate people about the damage they do to the world by choosing to reproduce, etc, whine, etc".
BS. Sure, and do you know how many miles of farming you need to support each of those people at a USA level of consumption.
The point of the stat is not the the entire world could function in an area that size, but to point out that the world is mostly empty space. The earth can sustain FAR more people than many think.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I know this'll get flamed, but dmatos has a point. Why the hell dont we attach some sort of engine (nulcear, maybe?) to the asteroid, and just have it piloted back to NEO, and just mine it out, and use the shell and engine for another trip to another asteriod. Anyone here ever seen the Star Trek episode with the asteroid ship Yonata (sp?). I think it's called "For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." Isn't that within our technological range? With the asteroid being in a NEO, we don't have to spend the exorbitant sum to put it in orbit on the first place! Think about it, people!
In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster imagines YOU!
...that the future as prophesied by Parallax Software in their hallowed work "Descent", would be dominated by the Post Terran Mining Corporation (PTMC) and mankind's endless quest for minerals, and blowing up robots.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
> I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit
> in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas.
> The world is very big.
Texas is a big place. The world is only a couple orders of magnitude bigger. Exponential population growth means that if your numbers are right, within a half dozen generations such housing would cover earth's landmasses from end to end.
Personally I'm certain that we'll get the rest of the world's women well educated enough to prevent that from happening. But how much closer we get before that happens will be most interesting.
So, what are everyone's bets as to where the Earth's population will level out?
I'll take 20 billion.
As the writer said, "Few believe that the station's scientific value will ever justify its astounding cost." The corporation profit value is the only justification for the space station's astounding cost. Almost ANY space project makes more value/cost sense then the space station.
Asteroid mining is not PRIMARILY to send the stuff back to Earth!!! It's mostly to avoid the extreme expense of sending stuff from Earth to orbit. If anyone can figure how to get water for a four-person crew out of an asteroid for less that $300,000/day, then that's worth pursuing. Ferrying stuff from near-Earth asteroids to orbit- or moon-based manufacturing could/should be MUCH cheaper than sending it up from Earth.
hopefully they won't find any unfriendly aliens...
Of course, these colonists would never be able to return to Earth; living in a nearly gravityless environment would weaken thier bone structure to the point where they would look like a jellyfish blob if they came back to Earth's 1G. Plus, the people would probably grow to be rather large after a few generations, so space ships would need to have larger living quarters. Gotta remember these little things...
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
If we can get a team of guys working on an oil rig to land on a comet we sure as hell can mine an asteroid. Come on people use your heads!
I disagree. First you build the automated factory spending money to buy it fast. Then use the enhanced production to produce your missile base and you'll still have it done faster than if you started the missile base first.
Of course this assumes your either playing psilons or have traded for one of the technologies since they both occupy the same spot on the tech tree.
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
Good point. I would suggest that for the foreseeable future we could just say that whoever gets to it first owns it. Even if you wanted to just land on every asteroid you could find, there would still be billions of them left out there unclaimed. If someone wants to waste their time claiming every hunk of rock they can touch who are we to stop them?
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
I found this funny picture of an asteroid hunter when following a link on the webelements page.
But if you get carried away and lower too much mass to the Earth, you'd eventually change the gravity field of the Earth
Doubt we need to worry. We'd need to bring so much down here to make any difference, and anyway, we'd be sending stuff back up (space craft, people...).
We'd need to be being careful not about how much we bring down, but what we bring down, IE nasty chemicals etc.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
This is not really naive at all, although I agree it's a bit premature. As others have specified, logistics is a problem easily solved with time. The extraction costs and distance add to the one-time cost in some scenarios, but not all of them. For example, the "let's build our refinery right on the asteroid" camp has to get to the asteroid with enough non-local stuff to get the refinery underway, but then, assuming it's designed to be self-sufficient, it'll be able to churn out materials from then on. Properly thought out (and barring major disasters, the risk of which can be minimized through proper planning), the refinery will pay for itself over time. Since this is the same logic that applies to every coal mine on Earth (sink some costs to get started, then get it back plus profit over time), there's no reason it won't work eventually.
Virg
P.S. traveling to 3 AU takes much time, but not much energy. The Voyagers use no fuel at all for travel, only maneuvering.
I find this idea that we can pollute space without any consideration for the consequences ridiculous. We are constantly running into sites polluted many years ago. Your arguments for moving our pollution to space sounds too similar to the mindset that created all these polluted hazardous waste areas that we are now spending so much money to clean up.
Umm, your figures are making the assumption that you would need to take the several hundred tons of stuff there and back. Besides to get it back all you really need to do is build a remote miner, a mass driver and sling shot the stuff to a space station
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
But why on earth(pun intended) would you just ship the raw stuff back. Use it to manafacture the raw materials into stuff in space then just drop the stuff down to earth.
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
Let's just build more Resource controllers and collectors. Oh...wait...never mind.
What about mining Cruithne? You know, the second moon of Earth it was on Slashdot about 9months ago) Its rather big, and right around Earth, so it would be good for a first try.
Gotta keep them controllers protected, they're a godsend when minerals are far off.
This planet's already been fscked up as a result of our last century of spiting it.
So now we can mine asteroids and it's too expensive to bring the goodies back to Terra. Next logical extension, let's move to space.
We can do all the dirty work there in the giant vacuum, and let the ecosystems of Terra begin to heal. Maybe we'll learn some respect for life in the thousands of years we'll have to spend in exile...
We'll have to be careful with asteroid mining though, changing the mass and trajectory of objects in such a wonderfully stable orbital system. If we use an unstable O/S, we might end up crashing Terra into Io or something worse. Keep working on that kernel!
In 1999, marijuana killed 0 Americans...
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Home is where the heart is, but the stars are made of latinum. --75th Ferengi Rule of Aquisition
Once you have a LEO and Geosync platform system, they could provide the launch/service facilities for further development. This would include permanent stations at the L4 and L5 LaGrange points as well as a permanent moon base. So where does the O2 come from for all the people to breathe? Mine it from the regolith on the moon. There is also a good chance that there is frozen water ice on the moon. That would be a nice resource for Off-Earth operations.
Since L4 and L5 are gravitationally stable points in the Earth/Moon system. those stations could provide several things: 1) launch/service facilities for missions to Mars, the asteroids and outer planets; 2) facilities for processing the materials mined from the asteroids; 3) scientific laboratories for experiements that cannot or should not be performed on Earth.
As to the benefits of mining and other manufacturing productions moving Off-Earth, consider the environmental impact. Let's stop strip mining and polluting the Earth and move these things (which are still necessary to human society and willl be for a while) to areas where there is no ecological system to disrupt or destroy, such as the moon and the asteroids. Not to mention the benefits of better refining derived from outside the gravity well: better optics, stronger alloys, purer forms of crystal. And for all those worried about various biological/medical/genetic research that runs amok and creates monsters and giant, man-eating cockroaches and such, let's completely isolate the research to a lab in space where the chances of contaminating the environment on Earth are virtually non-existent.
I know that we now have the ISS up there, but it's a poor excuse for a space station from a species that sent humans to the moon . . . 40 YEARS AGO!!! What the hell have we done lately except putter around in LEO? Let's get out there and DO something for a change!
The only thing that will unite humanity is a threat from outer space - Albert Einstein.
- What was he not saying?
I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
First thing's first, we need a cheap launch system to get the initial materials up to orbit. A space elevator won't do it, though. That's far beyond our tech capabilities for a while yet. We should begin with a series of orbital platforms: a few in LEO - Low Earth Orbit - and a few in geosynchronous orbit. then, establish an orbital ferry system between them. This would provide a cheaper way to transfer materials and people outside the gravity well.
I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
First, there was alt.pave-the-earth.
Now, we should seperate that.
alt.pave
alt.pave.earth
alt.pave.moon
alt.pave.other-orbiting-objects
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Hmmm.... let's see, trillions of dollars / 2 kilometers / 10 square inches = $19.94! Doh, I got ripped off!
But seriously, does anyone see the interesting mind set of Prof Lewis saying that space if good because of its infinite resources... Just because it's there doesn't mean we should try and use up as much as we can..
Besides, poor Mr. T's gold chains would be seriously devalued, I wouldn't be able to take him seriously anymore if he is just wearing worthless chains!
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"Do you hear the Slashdotters sing,
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Oh bother.
Aerobraking large objects in Earth atmosphere is a very bad idea. Not only do you add heat to an already warming system, you'll melt large amounts of various gases into the atmosphere. No, a couple of asteroids wouldn't matter, but after hundreds and thousands of them... Of course, the largest argument against aerobraking is that you run a rather large risk of either skipping the asteroid back into space, sending it hurtling to the ground, or having it break up from the stress. NASA engineers lost the mars polar explorer due to mixing calculations from km to miles. Imagine a comercial organization and the "cost-cutting" measures THEY would take!
The trick will be to build extremely low delta-v engines that could very slowly move the asteriod into an orbit that intersect Earth's, and slow it down enough that it will get "cought" by our gravity (or the moon's). There's no reason why you would need to have the asteriod get here quickly, especially when you start a continous operation. If it take a few years for the thing to make its way toward us, who cares? Especially true if you could manage to get an automated factory installed.. you'd have a few billion tons of proccessed whatever just floating into orbit after a couple years.
"BeOS is a great operating system" -Doug Miller, Microsoft
Don't let anything float off into space! It will help them build the Sinistar faster!
We're already past that point.
All you sad "the future of humanity is in space" extropians need to get a clue. Forget it!! It's not going to happen. All space is going to be is expensive entertainment for a few thousand scientists and engineers, and something to fill the gap between commercials on TV (and between banner ads on the web.) This planet is FUCKED, folks, WE fucked it, and it's not going to get UNFUCKED by some kind of magical technological solution. That's the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place!
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If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
The difference is that in the case of Sahara sand you can't simply push it in the right direction and wait for it to arrive. Price to mass really has little to do with it.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
What Astro-mining is about, the Kibo way:
1. Getting there what you can't get here.
2. Free delivery.
Lemme start with the first of my hypothesies. What you really get from an asteroid isn't really spiffy metals. We've got those here. If I want gold I by a bunch of land, blow it up, pump in some cyanide and kill all the migratory birds that see my lakes of leftovers. I can then sell it for about $10/g or so. But what I get from asteroids is that they are in space. This gives me low vapor pressure and a 0-g enviroment to refine in. Low pressure enviroments are hard to make. Hydrogen is bad for metals, and really any non-metal (in extreamly general terms now) is bad for metals. If I melt them with a convienently located vacuum, thats just handy. But more importanly, I get a 0-g enviroment. When you alloy metals, or dope anything, to some degree, you fight gravity. It's gravity that gives you and orientation of up. Without that, you can make some ultrapure metals, or really interesting alloys. But at this point we're talking about foundries in space (who wants to make space more dangerous?). I don't think anyone is gonna be ready for that for a while yet, but they're kinda needed to make the whole endevor worth while.
Lemme go back to that second part. The other nice thing about asteroids is that they're a lot of material, and they're already in space. Since we're talking about a whole new class of superalloys as the what, with only the most demanding bleeding edge applications in need of them, it's kinda nice to have those alloys made where they're almost exclusively used. A space PT cruiser with Irridium lining for every astro-boy and girl! Stuff like that. If we want to build long term structures in space, it'll be nice to not mearly superalloys, but some of the densest materials ever created in our erector set. On top of it, our left overs are probably silicates and carbon, nice for alloying, and making other things too.
The better place to look for unobtanium, the supermaterial that will make toasters so cheap banks will just give them away is right hear on earth. Oddly, it'll probably be with a little help from biology, solid state physics and some ol fasioned ingenuity. Biomimetics: basically humans coopt small organisms to make small stuff they make, but out of what we tell them to make it. If you're familiar with chalk, that's the same stuff as nacre (mother of pearl). Everone knows chalk is weak and very brittle. Nacre is hard and tougher than any of the ceramics that come to my mind. Well the animal lays down the chalk in way that looks very similar to a brick wall. If we can trick it to use something that's useful like Alumina (Al2O3) then we've got some damn nice stuff that's very strong, chemically resistant, extreamly light weight, and tough enough to use in less specialized applications. And thats the really key, not more specialization, but less of it.
Or maybe I'm full of shit.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
And if we mine all the asteroids we don't have to worry about armageddon
bluGill:
Since you are using robots and solar power your costs are lower
Lower than...?
The cheapest power is nuclear fission, especially if you're using robots and you don't have to use much shielding or design-in other safety devices.
How do define ownership? People, or rather NASA, seems to think that space is theirs. Sooner or later people will get out there. And then what? Have someone decide that they own Mars, or that asteroid, or anything.
This article talks about making/saving money up there, but that alone opens the door to tremendous conflict over ownership
Have you read my journal today?
They got here 200 years before the British. They assumed the idea of discovering new territory was stealing gold and shipping it back to Spain.
The guys who really made the big bucks were the ones who decided to move to the New World and create wealth there. The result was a little experiment called "The United States of America." I've heard some rumors it turned out to be a good investment.
The asteriods will produce a new Iron Age as soon as we discover a source of air and water out there. Ice asteroids, anyone? How about the rings of Saturn? (Sure they're a long way out there, but that's a lot of ice.)
Another fact many people don't recognize is that there are three asteroid belts. These appear to be the result of perturbations in the asteroid orbits caused by Jupiter over the millennia.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Costs to land something are far lower than costs to launch it. If you want to land lumps of asteroidal iron, nickel or gold, you just sculpt it into a vaguely aerodynamic shape, attach some small steering rockets and a simple electronics package and point it into the atmosphere aimed at your favourite desert. Atmospheric braking would get it down to a few times the speed of sound, at which speed it should stay mostly in one piece as it comes in, and then you just drive out to the middle of the crater and start carving.
Who going to do this job? Got to leave your shitty little town? Barely got out of high school? Spend the weekend drinking, shooting stop signs and beating your girlfriend? Hey - become a space miner ! Great Pay ! Union Benefits !
A lot of microminiaturization work also happened because of the Cold War and the need to have ICBMs with onboard navigation computers, but basically you're right.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I never let my resource collectors go out alone.
Usually, I'd build two collectors, and one controller. I'd have the controller guard the collectors, but since it doesn't have guns, it just followed them.
I'd also usually build a few multi-gun corvettes to guard the resource controller.
I mean, sure, our asteroid belt seems pretty empty now because we don't see anything on radar. But we haven't built the long-range sensor platform yet either.
Just something to think about.
One thing is blasting a piece of surface to grab some minerals, the other to dig a hole to hide in.
Do you think that closed mining is more proper to use on the Moon? I don't think so. First due to the nature of the rock, second because there is no need to dig it when you may use a pair of nukes to fragment rock, third because this world does not have atmosphere and low gravity. On such environment, dust takes longer to settle down and spreads much larger. Besides fragments of rocks will be flying upon, more frequently, than this would happen on Earth.
And why to spend so much work if nukes can be reliably used there? Note that, due to several reasons, they can be used in a fraction of power needed on Earth. Second they can only be used effectively on subsoil. Third radiation would not be so widespread due to the lack of gaseous or liquid components on Moon surface.
So closed mining would be not only less economical but also more dangerous.
However open mining is also not without dangers. In a near time some places can get heavy on dust that gets harder and harder to settle.
With a well developed system of transport. mining the Moon would be more expensive than in asteroids. Mostly it is due to the fact the nearly lack of atmosphere. While asteroids lack atmosphere, they do not call so many meteoroids and micometeorites to their surfaces. Besides, they are not so prone to call powerful plasma storms. Moon does not have an atmosphere in full, however it possesses a layer of sodium constantly dropping out of its surface. In certain conditions this sub-atmosphere could be an hazard for such things like electronics.
Besides, in cases when a powerful sun storm comes up, it would be easier to take cover on the other side of an asteroid. On the Moon there will be the need to dig up bunkers and this may not be so simple on the basaltic surface of this planet.
At the top end of the technology curve (i.e. US, EU), population is _dropping_.
Once people have enough, they stop having so many kids and they just lay back and enjoy life.
Once the developing nations hit that point, their population growth will dwindle to nothing too, and everything will calm down.
Of course, we need to worry about the fact that your average first world person consumes a massive amount of resources, but we're working on that one.
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My Journal
BTW, not all asteroids are in the asteroid belt. Some -- including some potentially very useful ones -- are much closer.
IMNSHO = In my not-so-humble opinion
Extraction costs could come down a lot - you don't have to be picky about disposal of waste. What you don't want, you leave right there. There's a massive savings right off the bat - let's have a stab in the dark and say about 50%.
Distance is not a great factor. A small delta-V means you get the materials into Earth orbit in a couple of years. Heck, equip the refinery with an ion drive and refine your reaction mass from the asteroid. Constant small force over long time = very large delta-V.
Yes, to make economic gains from asteroid mining, you can't be in the "Get Rich Quick" category. You have to be patient, and willing to pay large up front costs (research, development and launch). The payoff will be cheaper in-orbit materials, cleaner to-surface materials, and much less pollution on the Earth.
The longer you're willing to wait for processed materials to arrive in Earth orbit, the cheaper it becomes to ship them from the NEO, or even "Asteroid Belt" orbit.
The most expensive part of asteroid mining will be developing the robotic asteroid mine. Compared to research and development of this device, launch costs will be negligible. If we can power these things off "dirty" ion-drive fuel (say, iron, nickel or silicon) then we don't have to worry about refueling them.
There are huge economic gains to be made from asteroid mining. The hardest part is the first step.
The Moon has more gravity than an asteroid and fewer heavy metals, but it's much more convenient to reach. And it's a lot easier to launch from the Moon than from Earth.
Methinks perhaps Hemos has been playing just a wee bit too much Alpha Centauri...
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Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
'. . I miss the days when space exploration didn't have to pay for itself . .
And yet, the space program was the only real customer for shrinking the size computers down. It is because of the computing power requirement of Apollo that we all have desktop PCs (with several times the computing power of the Apollo computers.)
When the government invests in science projects, the downstream rewards are difficult to imagine but more than pay for the original investment.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Besides to get it back all you really need to do is build a remote miner, a mass driver and sling shot the stuff to a space station
That doesn't sound so easy to me.
You've got to ferry the mass driver system out there or else build it in place. Don't forget conservation of momentum -- if you're mining a significant portion of the asteriod's mass you're going to make your job lots harder. Then you have to build a system to intercept the material when it nears earth, either in many small and hard to find packets or in large and dangerous chunks. That system will have to match the material's velocity to Earth and then ferry it down.
Building such a system for a massive and inexpensive commodity like iron or nickel doesn't make any sense at all.
Look -- silica has an ecomic value; you can go to the hardware store and pay good dollars for sand for your sandbox or to mix with cement to make concrete. Somebody is making their living quarrying sand as we speak. If you went by current market prices the Sahara probably has billions of dollars worth of sand. The reason entrepreneurs aren't shipping sand from the Sahara is that you can quarry sand locally a lot cheaper than the cost of transport from North Africa. Not to mention if you shipped a few millions of tons of sand from the Sahara the price of sand would collapse.
This is the logic by which the guy concludes that there are trillions of dollars worth of iron and nickel on this asteroid.
If you go out there, it has to be for things that whose value to weight is high, like iridium. The commodity that fits this bill best is -- knowlege.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's a really interesting point.
I think it might make sense if you had a project that required huge quantities of iron in orbit -- say building a habitat to support hundreds of thousands of people
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Even at NASA's inflated launch prices, you're only paying around $20,000 a pound for shuttle payload, and most of that goes to keeping KSC running: the basic cost of a shuttle launch (materials, labor, etc) is about $150,000,000 with a payload of about 60,000 pounds into a low inclination orbit, or about $2500 per pound, the rest is all fixed infrastructure cost. Next-generation launchers could get that down to $1,000 a pound or less, but at the moment there simply isn't a large enough market to justify the investment required to do so.
Hmmm. So I was only about an order of magnitude off -- not bad for a sheer guess. Consider though. Have you ever been to a mine like some of the huge copper mines they have in Chile?
Imagine having to launch the space equivalent of one of these. Curb weight -- 126,000 pounds. Even at $1000 per pound, you're talking $126 million dollars just to get this into orbit, much less to where you're going to need it. And a major mining operation would crawl with things like this -- only they'd be more complex and expenseive because they'd have to operate in space without gravity.
Even $1,000 a pound is vastly more than most of those materials would be worth down here, so you'd make much more money from launching a simple manufacturing facility into space and using the asteroid materials to bootstrap your entire space manufacturing infrastructure.
Which is why we need a space station. We barely know how to make space systems on the ground now, much less how to make them in space where everything is more complicated and difficult.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Area of texas divided by world population is about 1200 sq feet per person.
Ryan
You make your gas there. Same way we're going to get astronauts back from Mars. (No atmosphere, but once you get up to speed, it's only a matter time to go far enough out pick up a large chunk of ice from Saturn and bring it into some orbit more amenable to mining.) The outward flight could be solar sails, save yourself some fuel. Finding out something's mass is easy -- try to move it. Design around a target mass, say, 1000 kg. You don't really need to worry that much about size since there's no reason to keep the mass inside your craft.
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
A.k.a. "noble metals" because of their high resistance to oxidation and corrosion. Rare, costly, and mainly used in catalysts, electronics and jewelry
From the article:
In the first category are gold and the platinum-group metals, which include platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium, rhodium, and ruthenium. These rare elements are in tremendous demand. They are essential to the miniature fuel cell technology that promises efficient, nonpolluting energy. They are also used widely in the electronics industry, for things like high-capacity disk drives and sophisticated capacitors, and as catalysts in pollution control devices.
While you may be correct if you said this about paper, I am certain that you are dead wrong about aluminum. The energy cost of reducing aluminum to metal is enormous, and the scrap price of aluminum (free market!) proves conclusively that it's cheaper to reclaim than to refine.
You forget that you need to collect the can - factor in the transportation, storage, and processing, and in many cases, it's cheaper to make a new can. That's why you have to pay a deposit - there isn't enough of an economic incentive to recover the can (unless you're in some situtations, like a statium, or large urban center. I speak from a Canadian perspective, we have REALLY low population density, so transportation costs are often higher than the value of what you're recycling!).
I won't get into paper. Want to recycle paper? Burn it and sprinkle the ashes around a tree that you just planted.
My point, of course, is that it's not the can, bottle, paper, whatever. It's the total energy consumption in the process.
I bring this point up at least once a month here, so I'll have to get some numbers next time I'm visiting the university. I'm pretty sure I'm right on the alumnium can in my situtation, but I'm not sure about averages.
..don't panic
Is the king supposed to just decree that this happens? It will happen eventually, when it makes economic sense. But you have to have an economic space infrastructure to support it.
If you are waiting for when it makes economic sense for companies to move large factories off-planet, you're in for a long wait. It will only become economically feasible when all but the last fraction of a percent of useful resources has already been converted into disposable diapers. Around then, it will be cheaper to get resources from space, and I'm sure the big congolmerates will all launch advertising campaigns about how great they are for caring about the earth and moving their nasty factories into orbit around this useless, polluted, lump of...err, I mean, beautiful, fragile world we call home.
Will this take some serious capital/scientific investments? Absolutely. But the major corporations that own these factories can better afford to foot the bill than the world's governments can, and if the governments actually set some REAL sanctions against pollution, they might actually do it.
And no, of course money does not make science. Scientists make science. How many more scientists do you think would work on this type of project if they could get paid a salary comparable to what they could get in industry? How many goverment employees are in their current jobs because the pay is just outstanding? Pay the scientists what their efforts are worth, and you'll have giant brains the world over lining up on the street to fill out job applications, unlike now, where there are a few idealists and enthusiasts, and the rest guys who couldn't cut it in industry.
Of course, no goverment will ever have the courage to shoot itself in the pocketbook by doing any of this, so the entire discussion is pointless...
Andrew
So how much would it cost and what would it take to park this thing next to the space station? is it possible to orbit a rocket/sail/whatever big enough to move that thing around up there? Are there better candidate rocks?
If it was parked next to the station, what could we be able to do with it? Would we need an entire factory in orbit before we start?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
First one to land on AN asteroid would probably be able to lay claim to IT. Even if some government decided to lay claim to the asteroid BELT, it'd be pretty much unenforceable.
There are millions of asteroids, and thousands of them are large enough to anchor equipment. There may be other variables of viability, such as usable trajectories of returned mass to Earth, or inter-asteroid collisions, but there's plenty for all developing nations to have their own, several times over.
[
As usual, most ppl claiming the economical viabily of space mining just multiply the rough guess of the total abundance with the current market price. Geez.
;-p
Hello, extraction costs? Hello distance? Hello concentration? Yeah right, 'making rocket fuel from icy asteroids' in orbit at 3 AU (a couple of years of travel time). Lets factor in how much fuel you loose just transporting it about
This is so naive.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
I don't know which study you "heard," or even why it would be a study. That knowledge would require calculation, not study.
Let's see:
Size o' Texas: Pretty Fuckin' Big.(PFB)
Size o' land needed for a neighborhood-style home(SOLNFANSH ): 1200 Square Feet
Number o' homies(NOH ): 6 Billion.
NOH / 4 * SOLNFANSH = 1.8 trillion square feet
PFB = 1.4 trillion square feet (I just looked it up)
so, PFB is not quite FBE (Fuckin' Big Enough), and that doesn't include land for things like, oh, say streets 'n stores 'n schools 'n stuff. (and farms and offices and power plants and lots of other things that I excluded because they didn't start with s.)
Pete
Stop just a second. Do you really think that NASA's money is spent in space? No. It's spent down here, on earth. It goes to people here on earth. It trains people here, on earth. It fill libraries and laboratories and universities here, on earth.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I'm fine with this entire commentary, especially it's urgent tone, except...
Practical fusion may be farther away than asteroid mining. Let's invest in the hydrogen economy for a while, instead. Which by the way would be helped by access to asteroid mining of platinum et al.
And doing all of the above doesn't relieve us of the need to learn to live sustainably (although stabilizing population is a huge first step.)
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
re-geeked:
Let's invest in the hydrogen economy for a while, instead.
...eh.
Reality Master 101:
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in
neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
..mmmkay. And I am pretty sure LeCorbusier would have liked us all living like ants in mile-high skyscrapers packed onto Manhattan. Just because the planet can sustain 50 billion human drones packed into megablocks feeding off of reprocessed waste doesn't mean we should set things up that way. Oh, and plus I read in a book once that aliens used to land in the desert in Peru. Honest.
Reality Master 101:
Fusion is an immensely complex problem, and just throwing money at a problem does not produce magical solutions.
...yeah, true, but expending more effort on fusion research than worrying about if NBC can convince Putin to keep Mir in orbit long enough for Survivor in Space would be nice. Billions for Pokemon but scant pennies for fusion and manned spaceflight? I exaggerate but my point is still valid.
rossarian:
6) Develop a working model for a reformed educational system that addresses the needs of every child at a reasonable taxpayer cost. Then become powerful and implement that system.
Project:Continue on the path of human extinction. Overpopulate planet for three centuries. Ridicule manned spaceflight. Hyperemphasize dependency on non-renewable fossil fuels. Decimate biodiversity and fill planet with toxins.
Objective: Survive beyond 2300 without retreating in small numbers into caves.
Anonymous Dipshit:
How on earth did this guy get moderated to 5?
Well, apparently because some people think that moving heavy industry into space while at the same time locking down population growth is a neato idea. Now go back to playing with your blocks.
Excelent post. My favorite part was your commentary on education. While education is corrolated to decreased children per woman, it has a stronger corrolation to economic status, and *that* has a strong corrolation to children per woman. Ironicly, the poorer you are, the more children you have - your children stop being liabilities, and instead become your assets. So, its a question of povery.
;)
The best way for an immediate reduction in population growth (providing birth control), however, is strongly hindered by religion. Most countries with high birth rates left in the world are very against the concept of contraception. There are some places that are open to it that don't have it readily available yet, mainly due to logistics issues (some places of india and bangladesh, for example), but not too many.
And, if anyone thinks that telling people not to have sex works, you're wrong
Just my 2 cents.
- Rei
Kneel Before Christ!
It seems to me mining asteroids is just going to another place to deplete more resources because it's become difficult to do so here. The more we spread ourselves out, spatially and in effort, the harder it becomes to control the results of our behaviour.
I realise the human race might be extinct by the time all the asteroids in the asteroid belt have run out. But it still seems to me it will take massive amounts of resources just to get the stuff, and in the end we will be talking about really valuable materials, similar to diamonds today, that will only end up being put in rich peoples' jewelry. Just like the jewelry industry today, poor people will be put in dangerous situations by large, amoral corporations to dig out pockets of "space-diamonds" to be put in the jewelry of rich people who couldn't care less. It doesn't seem like a venture that would really help humanity.
To me, there is a natural attractiveness to the idea of a clean, renewable, well-functioning Earth instead of just expanding the mess we have now elsewhere. Wouldn't it be cool if we didn't have to worry about resource usage or where to get resources because we'd worked out all our problems right here? Wouldn't it be nice if we had no pollution, no garbage, no shortages, not because we went elsewhere with a big scheme that will probably only benefit the rich, but because we worked together and found technologies here on Earth that helped us sustain it indefinitely?
Just my two cents...
The problem is that none of the people who ultimately make space policy get it. If they did, they'd pretty much be developing better ground to orbit tech and launching the kind of survey missions you mentioned. Right now, NASA is nothing more than a showcase of national prestige intended to generate flashy TV and magazine spots. Those results do not justify the cost, and what;s worse they actually set back the whole idea of space exploration by depicting the whole enterprise as nothing more than an ornament. Its a pitty too because we're very close on many fronts to being able get into space easily. At least if you believe all the optimism in Lockheed's info packets on the Venturstar. BTW is this project still being funded? Anyway, what we need is for one of the policy makers to set a clear achievable goal in this area. That's the big reason why NASA succeeded at sending guys to the moon. They had a clear goal to guide mission planning for the balance of a decade. Of course, the goal has to be sensible. In my opinion going to the moon wasn't really. A better goal would have been to develop a good reusable ground to orbit system and a truly useful space station--one that could be used as a forward base orbital transfer vehicles for mining asteroids. Hey, that'd be a pretty decent goal for today.
in the immature nature of this trollish string of posts, you say "Who knows what kind of meteors we'll find on an asteroid.". Meteroids are asteroids that go through the earth's atmosphere. It;s very doubtful you're going to find a piece of rock that bounced off the earth and back through the atmosphere onto a nearby floating asteroid : )
moox. for a new generation.
Awe only lasts so long. Space exploration can, and therefore should, pay for itself. Unfortunately, NASA isn't allowed to hang onto its own patents, but if it could, that would certainly generate some revenue. Yes, I'm aware of how the government could abuse that sort of power.
It's a bitch. Any asteroid worth building something on is too big for us to move, being in the miles across size range.
America is largely a capitalist nation, and the world is becoming more and more american over time. Whether this is a good thing or not is an entirely different argument. Regardless, if something doesn't show a reward, it's not a valid expenditure of taxpayer money. Mind you, the amount of research we get out of the space program definitely justifies the money that goes into it; Just in the area of plastics alone, we've made huge jumps because of the space program.
Also, it's not important to change inequality of life on earth, or to eradicate it, or what have you. That's called (depending on the degree) communism or socialism, and it's never been done successfully on this planet. What IS important is to raise everyone above a certain level; They should have a warm, dry place to sleep, be free of disease and parasitic infestation, have enough healthy food to eat and clean water to drink, and so on. A disturbing number of people on this earth are not in that situation, and that's what we should be concerned with. Don't worry about people who have more than other people; Worry about people who don't have enough resources to live.
Oh, and a further note there, survival ain't living. People should also have leisure time even if they don't have anything especially entertaining (or at least not to you and me, perhaps) to do with it, and at the end of the day, they should have enough energy to do it. I consider leisure a basic requirement of life. Without it, people go insane, and end up like Ross Perot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
IIRC, Cruitne follows a really wacky spinning-ball-around-a-horse-shoe orbit, which happens to be very close to the disc of the Earth orbit. It's timed very intricately so that Cruithne doesn't smash into the Earth.
An asteroid passing near Earth orbit could be mucked with to make it come back at an appropriate time -- that would be good. Get everybody on it, attach rockets, and fire it away so that it comes back in two years when it's ready to offload some material.
Cruithne would not be any closer that this and would actually be farther most of the time due to its crazy-ass orbit. More dangerously, however, changing Cruithne's mass could very easily send it crashing into New York.
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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Yeesh. If you want to the know the mass of the object you're bringing back, figure out how big it is (Got a measuring cup?), look up its density (hey, it's a refined metal), and voilà! You know the mass. Don't know the mass? That's fine too. Find something you *DO* know the mass of. Find a really sensitive weigh-scale. Use their mutual gravitational attraction.
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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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Not really. It takes just as much momentum change to do a transfer orbit from near-earth space to an asteroid as it does to get back from the asteroid's orbit to near-earth space.
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Uh, they're in orbit around the sun, not the earth. It still takes massive amounts of rocket fuel to get them to near-earth space and inserted into earth orbit.
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By the way, to put this all in perspective, orbital velocities around the sun are typically an order of magnitude greater than low-earth-orbit velocities. This makes it extremely expensive to send any significant amount of mass across the solar system. That's why it would be a huge technological accomplishment to bring back a 1-kg sample of Mars dirt that we could test for bacteria. (The Viking tests were inconclusive.) By contrast, bringing back even 1000 kg of metal from an asteroid is extremely ambitious, and that wouldn't even be a blip on the charts in terms of the world's production.
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An excellent idea, and one that could be taken a couple of steps further...
For instance... if you build a factory on some asteroid, the people working there would presumably be living there on the asteriod. Hence, living quarters and offices and such would be set up there. When the asteriod is mined out, and they decide to move on, the structure is still there, and able to be used as a supply point.
Hence, all that would have to be done is keep hopping from one rock to the next, expanding onwards and out, keeping these small resupply colonies along the way...
There is a very great distance - in terms of processing - from a hole in the ground (digging material up on an asteroid) and producing something useful. When you look at something constructed of metal - consider all the effort which took that object from ore, to 'sheet metal' of various sizes, to whatever object you are considering.
Although I think mining asteroids is a great idea - and a very worthy goal of human effort (effort much better spent than watching TV and destroying the planet with consumerism/greed and corporate imperialism (another argument)) - We are 'very close' to digging a hole in a Asteroid, which is a great distance from being able to actually do something useful with what we dig up.
I'm surprised the article doesn't reference the company SpaceDev. They are the world's first private asteroid mining company... well, they haven't really done it yet, so I guess they're the first to plan to do it. First launch should be some time next year.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The fact that we don't even begin to have such machines here on Earth doesn't seem to bother them. Mining of any type here on earth requires a lot of people to decide where to place the explosives etc.
I suppose that it would be conceivable to make some type of 'remote waldo' type of machines for the work, but I suspect that speed of light makes that pretty impossible. Move your hand and 10 seconds later the remote hand moves, then 10 seconds later you see the hand move. I don't see how that would work.
I think the only way to build mining equipment smart enough is to have a man controlling them. When you do that you have the habitat problem which the space station is designed to explore. The big plus from the space station is the millions of lines of tested, debugged, known good code, which the space station project will eventually deliver.
If you are going to have humans working in space then you need to have habitats that are long term livable. First the space station - then the mining, you can't do it any other way.
The fact that none of these people have ever put so much as a Tonka toy into space seems not to bother them at all. They strike me as 'know it alls'; i.e. the cluelessly confidant people who exist in the bottom 10 percentile of any given field.
Be sure to bring up lots of extra fuel. You will need some to do the mining, but more important, you will need extra to get the payload back. Most astorids happen to be on their own orbit and not simply waiting nearby. It is best to catch one while it is getting closer. It will take less fuel than trying to make a u-turn with the payload to come back. What kind of scales do you use in space to weigh your load. How do you calculate the fuel usage? How do you get back if your calculation is in error? (bring your own calculator to back up any figures NASA may give. (-: )
The truth shall set you free!
Okay...so....6 billion people...expanding geometrically...regressive regimes that refuse to curb birth rates or educate people...massive pollution...hmm...I'm sure everything will be fine for a few thousand more years...
Wrongo.
Wrongo, says you. You'll forgive me if I put just as much stock in your own doomsday vision of How Our Race Will End(tm) as I do in my own version (read: not much.) Let's go into a bit of an analysis of your proposed salvation of humanity:
1. Educate people enough to stop over-reproducing (shouts removed.) Thr trouble with this is, you can't educate reproductive habits. Truth be told, having a buttload of kids is a hard, taxing endeavor; people, when given an environment where they have things like life insurance, stable jobs and *gasp* Social Security, no longer feel the need or desire to crank out 12 or 13 kids to help run the farm and care for them in their old age. Education, while it runs pretty much statistically parallel to the number of children per family, is not a means for reducing population growth; rather, it is a result of higher quality of life in general, just as lower birth rates are. In a poor, underdeveloped country, each child born equals another opportunity to have some hope of care if and when you age, and will help reduce the amount of work you need to do once they are old enough to help with the household tasks. Education and birth rate are related, but the one cannot be used to directly influence the outcome of the other.
2. Distribute resources to feed the billions already on this planet. Why, so they can go and keep reproducing? The fact that we've already gotten so good at distributing the world's food supply is part of why there are so many of us now. (question: how long have banannas been a staple entry in virtually every American/European grocery store? That is some serious distribution of tropical fruit!) If you want to effectively lower the number of people on this planet, the last thing you want to do is supply every last one of them with food to eat! (Note: this sounds like a really shitty thing to say. It is; it's also true. True things can be amazingly shitty, but that fact does not invalidate them.)
3. Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points. This obviously necessitates the acquisition of asteroid raw materials. That is, indeed, an excellent idea. Of course, setting up a viable space station of international collaboration capable of supporting a regular crew over long periods of time is an essential early step in this mass exodus of the manufacturing industry to the final frontier; perhaps we should start with this first. Oh, wait--we're already working on this. Well hell, let's get those factories up there, then! And while we're at it, we'll instantiate a unified global government and unify people of all faiths and races in harmony! Chop chop, folks--no, don't bother me with the details, just do it!
Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development. I'm not talking about 20 guys in Berkely zapping a molecule of tritium every 18 months. We need Manhattan Projec[t] importance attached to this. Another good idea, but again, the need isn't urgent enough. If humanity ends up being a full 200 years in developing fusion power to a viable level (which I sincerely doubt will be the case), do you really think that it will have made that big of a difference 2000 years later? If you want to look at the long term effects of a problem, you need to step away from the "as soon as physically possible" delivery schedule for the solution. Humanity has a whole mess of things that "need their immediate and undivided attention" if we apply this same mindset to every other long term problem humanity is facing; you'll find that fusion power falls neatly into a big-ass clump of things that we can't possibly put off until tomorrow.
Nature has, does and will continue to adapt to humanity; it just may not be in ways we particularly like (mass famine, plague, loss of farmable land, costal flooding, etc.) What's more, while nature is perfectly capable of trimming us down to size when we outgrow our bounds, it's quite unlikely that nature will see fit to completely wipe us off the planet.
That sort of totality requires a human touch.
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
it's a doozy.
I agree with you completely. Unfortunately, it's the first step that is the hardest. Hopefully, we will be able to use the ISS Alpha as a base for constructing/deploying the first orbital factories. In this manner, it could provide economic as well as scientific returns.
Two more thoughts before I leave... Why not bring the entire asteroid into earth orbit, then use the leftover slag as a foundation for constructing further industrial plants? Thought #2 - I think that it won't be until we have a sizeable industrial sector based in orbit that we will be able to do any human exploration of our solar system. The gravity well is a killer when it comes to consuming resources. Imagine how much easier it would be to make a lander+orbiter if you didn't have to boost it off the earth first. There would be (virtually) no size limitation, as well as no need for heavy heat shielding, and no necessity to carry thousands of pounds of fuel for the sole purpose of boosting hundreds of pounds of fuel up to where you will need them.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Seems like the first one to get there will initially own the astroids, and therefore will have a monopoly on resources when earth's natural resources run out. Will there ever be a space war over these things? Seems possible to me.
I think to talk of asteroid mining is something of a misnomer - it implies that large scale operations will go on - and until we're very match more advanced than now, this won't be possible.
Asteroid research, perhaps - finding new elements and compounds, or extremely rare ones, but other than that no - even gold mining wouldn't be cost effective - it would cost far more than the gold was worth to collect it.
In addition, there are probably many undiscovered, but scientifically valuable, things in the rainforests of the world - and yet these are being destroyed while NASA goes into space. Why not a NASA for the seas or rainforests? I'm sure they could spend that money much better than in space. Is it just because space is sexy, and politically useful, but the seas are not?
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Before you get too excited, better look at ecconomics. Sure that astorid you are talking about mining to death has a few trillion dollars worth of metal on it. Sure you can mine it cheaper in the long run becuse you build a mini-refinery on it, and then use local materials to build a big one, and solar power for everything. Then you flood earth with whatever raw material. Opps, turns out that prices on raw metal haven't been going anywhere for a long time. Since you are using robots and solar power your costs are lower (assuming a good delevery system), but you have to contend with supply and demand. Lowering the price of iron doesn't increase demand anymore. All the customers want lower prices and there is compititon to keep prices lower, but the demand is fixed, we can produce more iron then we need. So you come in with your load of iron and now have to sell it to a market that by your presence isn't paying as much.
Long term it is a good idea. Why mine prime land when you can put a wildlife refuge or something else that is beatiful there. We have unlimmited asteroids (okay, but close enough), and nobody cares are them as nothing is living on them.
Remember don't invest money unless you are sure you can make money. If your mining platanum that is no problem, you can drive prices down and compittion out of buisness, with $.50/lb platinum (currently more then $500.00/lb if I remember right) becuase the stuff is usefully chemically if we could get enough to use it everywhere we want to. I think anyway, but you do your own homework before investing money.
Human history is full of examples of unsustainable voyages of exploration. Vikings landed on the American continent before the Spanish, but they were unable to sustain a population there. The Spanish went in with a business plan.
I can assure you that increases in wealth of one parts of Earth's population are rapidly transferred to others, although international market barriers often keep this from happening. If you look at Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, you'll understand that it is actually economically most efficient for producers to produce what they can best make. Advanced countries should design computers, not make tennis shoes. Less advanced countries should produce tennis shoes. Over time, the sale of cheap tennis shoes will bring wealth into the country (above subsistance farming, for example). The population will become better educated, and wealth flows will allow entrepreneurism (a great uncle of mine started a plastic bag factory in his native El Salvador, for example). Of course, the US still imposes protectionist tarriffs on Salvadoran textiles, because we're greedy and don't want Salvadoran peasants to have jobs...but that's why we have spoiled rich college students protesting the WTO and such.
Another example, 50 years ago, Korea was at the level of subsistance farming, now (at least the southern part) has a modern economy. Every impoverished country on the planet has a combination of a lack of democracy or a lack of enforcement of rights to personal property or both.
If we are to truly be in space, it will have to be in an economically sustainable manner. I'm not totally again socialized space science, but I know it alone will not keep us in space.
First of all, when you say that the raw materials from an asteroid don't have enough value, you're forgetting the fact that THEY ARE ALREADY IN ORBIT. Since it costs $100K US a pound to lift raw materials into orbit using current technology, this adds tremendous value to the raw materials from an asteroid, which could be used to build things like the International Space Station or comm satellites much more cheaply than they could be on earth.
Secondly, about "spending the money on the rainforest instead": show me some results. The money spent on the space program has benefitted the US economy immensely due to the spinoff technologies and industries it has created. We're talking at least a tenfold return on investment. It has also greatly benefitted medical science, and even our understanding of the environment. It's been a tremendous bargain, frankly, and we haven't even spent that much on it in comparison with things like, say welfare.
What has your side accomplished lately?
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
"Education"? Educate them about what? People are going to reproduce if they want to. Any other solution requires the government to regulate whether you can reproduce or not, which is a thousand times worse than anything (look at China).
Actually, no, education really does help overpopulation. Again and again, the number one way people have found to lower population growth is to increase female literacy. It makes sense, most of these women in developing countries don't necessarily want ten kids apiece. By increasing female literacy, you help people economically and you help them decide their own birth control strategy.
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
BS. Sure, and do you know how many miles of farming you need to support each of those people at a USA level of consumption. How many acres of trees to build each of those homes. How many acres of mines, powerplants, railroads, businessparks, distribution centers, shopping centres, etc. this takes?
You are fooling yourself if you think your statistic is even vaguely insightful.
I agree with most of the rest of the post. Except for the bit about fusion. Granted, there is no place you can go and say "I'd like fusion technology, how much is that?" But larger amounts of funds for research will cause it to happen sooner than later.
Don't expect me to navigate my spaceship through
:)
an asteroid mine when the automated mining bots
are infected with a computer virus created by a
rogue arms manufacturing / mining corporation to
overthrow the government!
I miss Descent...
Exactly. From what I understand, the major cost of establishing a permanent presence in space is getting it started. After a certant point, with the exception of a few things that need to be provided by earth, it becomes financially self-sustaining. Of course, then you run into the same problem as the British did with their colonies back a couple of hundred years or so.
-RickHunter
Here is what is needed to establish a self-reliant factory-system on an asteroid or another planet. We'll focus on a planet, as there are additional issues posed from how low gravity asteroids have (imagine a vehicle hauling a cart of ore that, when it hits a bump, flies into orbit).
;) The machine to assemble components would need to be brought in, and would probably be the most expensive device to transport. A larger machine could probably be assembled from a smaller machine, using some
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We'll take Mars as our sample planet to establish a base on, as it is a far more similar environment to earth, and I know more about it than the moon, easier for humans to survive on (more gravity means less muscular atrophy, etc)). We'll start with the assumption that we're stuck with in the current day: that we can only transport tools and small pieces of equiptment into space, not entire factory structures or even moderate quantities of raw materials.
1) Power. This is critical - you need power to do anything. Constructing a decent sized power plant takes time, and, for an initial base, having human
labor as your only source of energy to establish a power plant is unfeasable. I recommend a small, self-contained nuclear generator. Not using... oh, whats that called, the phenominon where a difference in temperature at a junction creates electricity... but a self-contained steam turbine which collects all the steam and cools it. This would be assembled on earth or in space, and then landed. This would be used for all mining/construction vehicles until the next stage could be assembled. This stage takes a large field of mirrors which rotate in 2 axises to follow the sun and focus its light on a piece of metal in the center. The turbine-and-steam-collection part from the old nuclear reactor is detached, and attached to the new source of solar heat. This technique is used on earth in a few places, but would be far more efficient in most other places in our solar system, where more light makes it to the surface and there is a greater difference in temperature between the steam and the outside atmosphere.
2) Resource collection. Also critical (ok, ok, everything discussed here is critical...). This would be best if it could be completely automated by a decent navigational AI. Basicly a small truck, rechargable (fuel cells, perhaps?), which has the capability to crumble the rock in the area the base is to be established, and either suction it or scoop it up into its bin. It runs back and forth between the ground and mineral processing.
3) Mineral processing. A few companies are working on devices like this in the present day. A system which is directly connected to a good power source, and melts all minerals put into it. Then, by various methods (separation of layers, electrolysis, etc), it gives you individual elements or critical compounds. Such output on mars, the most critical elements would be iron (quite abundant, generally in iron oxide), water (assembleable, possibly even minable directly in the form of ice), and oxygen (plenty to free from the rocks). Unwanted minerals could be thrown out, or saved for later processing by a future device. Also, atmospheric processing could
occur in a similar way (one would need to refrigerate, not heat, of course). Naturally, all devices would be, for the time, assembled on earth.
4) Component creation. This is a large scale extension of current 3-dimensional printers, and extending it to use of metals, assumably in most
cases, steel. One is fed in a 3d model, and it prints out the model. This may be fairly difficult to extend it to metals as such, as generally the method involves layering down a material that is soluable with some certain
compound in the spots where the desired material isn't to be placed, and the desired material where it is to be placed. Thus, we'd either need to
transport a very large quantity of both the material to be dissolved and the material to dissolve, or to create them both on mars. The later would be far preferable, but I leave it to the chemists to come up with a way to do
that, for now
of the original's components but building the large structural components with the smaller machine, to save weight.
5) Assembly. A series of cranes, welding torches, and other devices would be needed, in addition to people. If AI advances enough, expensive human
costs could be reduced with at least limited automatic assembly of components into structures.
6) Organic compounds. Hydroponics appears to be the best way to go for food and plant producs, seeds and nutrients brought in from earth. Animal
products should be avoided if at all possible, shipped in, or produced from easily replicable things like geneticly modified bacteria. Polymers should be generated from geneticly modified or naturally occuring bacteria in tanks constructed on the spot. The more automated every system is, such as plant growing, the lower the human cost, which will probably be the largest total
cost
7) Intricate components. Until a base is firmly established, all intricate components should be shipped in. Constructing a factory to produce, say, a pentium 3, would be truly immense task, involving many many compounds and many people. Even a simple electric motor would be difficult at first. So, ship them in
8) Profitability. For mars, not much in the immediate future. For the moon, helium 3 might prove profitable, but profitability is the last step, not the first. However, there is one good thing that happens here - all of the research into automating systems to cut the human cost would be immediatly applicable here on earth, too.
- Rei
Kneel Before Christ!
Yeah lets feed the 2 billion starving people and then have to feed the 4 billion starving 15 years later.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
and what happens when your particular product drops in price to the point where it becomes financially unfeasable to produce? same thing farmers do;
stockpile until the market dries up enough so that the price rockets up to the point where the producer can still profit.
the us government has LONG understood this, at least since midway through the great depression, and actually PAYS farmers the vaule of their would-be crop to not grow wheat, corn, and various other crops just so that farmers who do produce can be profitable. there's actually an entire sub economy in montana of people who own areas of land of 25,000 acres and live in huge mansions.
how do they make their money? by not growing wheat on that land. and the land is (nearly) tax-free, of course, because it's legitimate farm land. same deal with space mining. too much production? talk to the other miners and tell them to hold back production till prices rise. sound familiar?
ever heard of OPEC? bravo. BASIC ECONOMICS.
moox. for a new generation.
I'm sure all this sounds really good around the college dorm room, and I'm sure the chicks are very impressed. The problem is that your "solutions" either mean nothing or won't work. Let's take them one at a time...
EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
"Education"? Educate them about what? People are going to reproduce if they want to. Any other solution requires the government to regulate whether you can reproduce or not, which is a thousand times worse than anything (look at China).
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
Distribute resources to feed the billions already on the planet.
The world goes hungry not because of an unequal distribution of resources, but because of an unequal distribution of capitalism. It's a political problem, not a resource problem. If you want to feed the world, change the governments.
Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points.
Is the king supposed to just decree that this happens? It will happen eventually, when it makes economic sense. But you have to have an economic space infrastructure to support it.
Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development.
You seem to think that this has not already been done. Fusion is an immensely complex problem, and just throwing money at a problem does not produce magical solutions. The manhattan project succeeded not because of money, but because the world's smartest people gathered in one place out of patriotism. NOT out of money. Money is not the solution to every problem.
Fusion will happen, but we need some fundamental engineering breakthroughs first.
I'll just ignore all the other alarmist ranting, if you don't mind.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Metals are a commodity and their prices are affected by supply and demand. Rare metals that can be used in a number of high tech industries have a high price since there is a large demand, but only a limited supply.
NEO 3554 Amun is worth more than all of the platinum metal resources on Earth by several trillion dollars at today's prices only by virtue of being inaccessible. If it could be easily mined then those commodity price would fall quickly.
Alternatively, if the mining organisation maintained prices, thus maximising revenues, but the process by which they were doing it were relatively easily repeatable by others then comptitors would go looking for their own rocks - otherwise known as competition.
Also if the metals could be recovered and transported cheaply enough you could look to see even more mining companies going bust. (Though given the enironmental damage some of the mining companies have done that ain't necessarily a bad thing)
I think there's a good argument to get the ecologists going for this. Mining and smelting are really nasty polluters. If we do it in space, we get the benefits of having nice stuff without the mess in our back yard here on earth that comes from making the nice stuff. Plus, we don't have to destroy all kinds of natural wonders while prospecting for ore or energy supplies to power the processing plants.
science is a religion
New advances in ultrasonic drilling is reducing the complexity of asteroid sampling devices, and vaccuum smelting processes are being actively pursued. These, plus the scientific observations afforded by the Shoemaker-NEAR spacecraft will make it possible to avoid paying $10,000+ a lb to carry the materials needed to build tomorrows space colonies and industrial space presence.
The types of missions people pay the most attention to are the warm and fuzzy ones like J. Glenn's return to space and the Mars Pathfinder. The missions that will provide the best return on our investment in the future are the Cassini's, the SOHOs, and the Shoemaker-NEAR. They may not be as flashy as a remote control car driving a few feet on Mars, but they provide the type of rock-hard scientific data that's needed to get us into space for keeps.
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You are a fucking moron.
Do you know why the Bible calls people sheep? Because sheep are stupid. Test me on this - put a group of sheep out in the woods and see how many survive a week. They'll be falling off cliffs, be eaten by carnivours and just starve to death. Dumb. Stupid. If you've stepped back and observed some of mans blunders in the past few hundred years, the comparison is accurate. As smart as we think we are and as "superior" as we think we are, we're just plain stupid. We'd die in our own fesces rather than change our ways. "No, we don't want to stop clear-cutting - that would mean some of us would have to find new jobs" - tell me that's not stupid. "A million dollars a day in fines for ecological damage? Sure, no prob - we spend that in toilet paper..." Take the drought here in Texas - our lake got down to 5 feet deep before emergency measures and conservation measures were "suggested". Huh? And those measures allowed us to use twice the water we normally use.
Ha - sorry dude, but the human race is coming to an end and we're the losers. Or our children or their children. We don't think ahead. We don't take steps early. A few of us voice what we _all_ know, but the rest of us, well, wait for a shepherd to take care of it. Us sheep are too busy munching on this stale and poluted grass to do anything about it. The answers have been around for years, the technology has been around for years but the smartness is not there. Don't blame it on the "Twisted and Evil" oil empire - it's simple lazy stupidity that's the fault here. Wonder who'll replace us when we're gone...
BTW - Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
While reading this article I'm sure some people were thinking of the investment possibilities of funding an asteroid mining operation. The thought of a multi-trillion dollar asteroid is appealing, but the article takes a pretty naive view of wealth.
We really live in a world of plenty. There is more than enough food and resources for everyone on earth, but a small portion of the population controls the majority of the resources for political reasons. Make no doubt about it, the same entities which control the majority of wealth now would claim ownership of space resources. I doubt if this would improve the lives of the disenfranchised or make many changes here on earth.
I can definitely see how this would make long term space station operation more affordable. In fact, I would tend to think that the most sensible route would be to use a large asteroid as a space station foundation. Build the station on the asteroid itself. I can't see the point of harvesting the materials and moving them to another location. This probably relates to the potential for altering the trajectory of an asteroid for our purposes, and I'll confess I'm not familiar with the challenges of doing this.
I'm rambling a bit, but my point is that pure science shouldn't have to promise us that it can turn lead to gold or turn a profit. It also shouldn't imply that riches in space will change the inequity of life on earth, because that is a political and social challenge that science is largely unable to affect.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
On Earth metals are found almost exclusively in the form of oxides, sulfides, etc. These compounds are lighter and therefore floated to the surface as the Earth formed. Metals in their heavier elemental forms are at least hundreds of miles below the surface.
Producing the elemental form of a metal from these compounds is a pretty simple chemical reaction. For example, iron oxides are reduced using carbon, producing iron and CO2. Unfortunately, this means that a vast amount of CO2 is released to the environment in the process. There are no shortcuts and no significantly cleaner ways to do it - it's basic chemistry. You get a few kilograms of CO2 for each kilogram of steel you produce. Add do that the energy required in the process which is usually also produced by burning fossil fuels and you end up with around 20 kilograms of CO2 for each kilogram of steel. Take a moment to think about the weight of your car. The emissions it will produce over its entire lifetime are about the same magnitude as the amount produced just in reducing the metal, not to mention the environmental cost of producing other parts.
Some asteroids were large enough (and hot enough) for the lighter compounds to float to the surface. After they cooled down they were struck by other asteroids and the chunks that came from their cores are almost pure elemental metals.
Getting them closer Earth is the tricky part. The delta-Vs required not too high for some of the asteroids, though. The cheapest and most practical method of slowing them down as they approach the Earth is aerobraking. I suspect that this solution will not be too popular, though...
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The REAL impact of asteroidal mining/processing would be to eliminate most mining activities, especially bulk mining, hydraulic mining, and strip mining for metals. All have nasty environmental side effects, and are ugly and difficult to boot.
Plus you have the advantage of nearly unlimited energy from the Sun, either via solar cells for electricty, or via mirrors concentrating light to power smelting processes. And, once you have one good industrial plant Up There, you can bootstrap off of it to make another: several years of "bacterial" growth of orbital industrial plants, and you have a sizeable economic base in space. . . (g)
There, IMNSHO, is the REAL advantage of asteroidal.space mining. . .
In the early 80s Richard Gertz, professor at the Colorado School of Mines, was studying various techniques for mining extraterrestrial resources. He had obtained and analyzed samples of asteroids from meteorites for their "ore grade". His opinion was that Lewis was off in his estimate of the ore grades available on the asteroids -- that although the concentrations of precious metals was high, their thermodynamic availability was lower than would be considered economic to mine on the earth. He further pointed to a nickle-iron 'asteroid' that had actually fallen somewhere in Australia -- they know where it is and that it contains enough nickle and iron to supply a good chunk of the world's needs for these metals -- but they just don't have a way to cut it up economically. This is a guy who actually ran his own, one man, cyanide gold leaching process at an abandoned mine in the middle of the desert so he took his mining seriously and he was really interested in doing space resource work.
I haven't had a chance to look at Lewis's stuff myself primarily because based on Gertz's analysis and the reputation Gertz had with folks I dealt with at the California Space Institute who were analyzing lunar rocks for utilization (primarily insitu but also including LOX generation) I decided I would have to shove his stuff way down on my list of priorities to read.
Earlier this year, the Colorado School of Mines hosted the first-ever roundtable on "Space Resource Utilization." That's funny -- I went back to the article and found this reference to Gertz's institution. So far as I know, Gertz was the only guy at CSM doing space resource utilization back in the early 80s.
Seastead this.
Okay...so....6 billion people...expanding geometrically...regressive regimes that refuse to curb birth rates or educate people...massive pollution...hmm...I'm sure everything will be fine for a few thousand more years...
Wrongo.
We either move the factories off this rock or we drown in our own wastes. We either crack the controlled fusion problem (maybe we should spend more money on that than...say...cosmetics? Nah...)
or we are going to bleed the planet dry of petrochemicals----and drown in more waste. Fusion too tough for 5 or 6 decades? Get powersats in orbit (constructed with asteroidal raw materials) or its going to be brownouts for the next hundred years. Not to mention the air is going to be brown anyway...
Look folks, all you general luddites, "its too expensive, we should worry about Social Security"-ers, "Mother Gaia will protect herself"-ers, and "well, uh, things won't be too bad for another hundred years or so"-ers need to shut the hell up. Either control birthrates and educate the starving billions or we are going to collapse under the mass of our waste and energy and resource consumption.
1. EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
2. Distribute resources to feed the billions already on the planet.
3. Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points. This obviously necessitates the acquisition of asteroid raw materials.
4. Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development. I'm not talking about 20 guys in Berkely zapping a molecule of tritium every 18 months. We need Manhattan Projecy importance attached to this.
Of course....NONE of this will get done. Only after the planet is a teeming desert where we all suck smog and eat krill steaks will anyone stop to think...gee...maybe we should have put some effort into orbital industries and Belt mining.
Oh well. Everybody get back to watching Survivor II. Bye now.
Plus, do you know for certain there isn't a kind of life there? Think back to real Star Trek and the horta, perhaps horta's live there and we;re about to destroy their habitat.
Repeat after me:
Star Trek is NOT a documentary.
Thank you
Can't be too complicated . . . shoot 'em once and they split in half, shoot 'em again and they split in half again. Repeat until they're pocket-sized.
Why not get the factory to the materials? Considering the size of most asteroids, it wouldn't take much to anchor a refinery to it, and just launch the refined metal back to the earth. Of course, we could also leave it in orbit and use it to build the structural components of (long-haul ships|space stations|satellites) outside of the gravity well, thus saving millions of dollars.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams