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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?
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.
You're forgetting the value of having the stuff in orbit, which effectively inflates its value by about $100K a pound. Use it to build satellites and space stations, in nice clean vacuum, and without having to withstand the stresses of launch.
And, moving stuff around in space is not very expensive compared to the cost of lifting stuff out of Earth's gravity well. If you're willing to move stuff over the course of a few months, ion propulsion and favorable orbital mechanics make it doable.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
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."
Sure, but the article also says that launching about quart of water into orbit costs over a quarter million bucks according to the same article. Consider the cost of going farther, extracting the material, and applying the delta V to get it back down to earth. 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. Assuming the cost to extract the material and get it back to earth is roughly on the same order of magnitude as the launch costs (a very generous assumption), then we aren't going to be mining asteroids for iron and nickel any time soon. Even iridium which is much more valuable goes for something like $400 per troy ounce -- you'd lose 8K$ on every ounce you brought back.
It'd be more economical to mine landfills for iron and nickel we've already thrown away.
I'm not saying asteroid won't happen eventually, but the technology has to develop a lot farter to make it economical. The ISS is a step towards developing more economical space technology.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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