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NASA On Mining Extraterrestrial Sources
FortKnox writes "Looks like something from the game "Homeworld", but NASA discusses mining ore from planets/asteroids or any other source of "Cosmic Dirt"." I remember debating this idea in high school debate - it's a wonderful idea.
This has profound implications for new ventures into the wonderful world of hallucinations.
Its seems that a project like this would take a lot of people to operate. How do you get those people to the planet/astroid and how do they sustain life while there?
FearLinux.com
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
In this recent article, Honda said it had contracted Asimo out to do receptionist work for IBM. Working as a miner would be so much cooler. With the miner's union on the decline for the last 50 years, this could really be a killer blow :)
BEN
"As example, processing of Martian resources to churn out fuel for a Mars sample return mission could be later scaled up to support human expeditionary crews on the red planet."
Wonderful idea or not, we're decades away from this. Right now, we can barely get people to the moon. We managed to get a tiny little explorer to the moon. Now, they're already thinking about putting PEOPLE on mars?
Take things one step at a time, I say. Let's wait a while, allow the technology to improve, and then evaluate what to do once we can place people on other planets.
I'm sure we can come up with far better things to do if we could get humans on Mars. And I pray it doesn't involve stripping the planet of its natural resources like we're doing here on Earth. I hope by the time this becomes reality, we're better at drawing resources from nature (i.e. solar power) and that we won't have to resort to strip mining on other planets just to keep up our quality of life here on Earth.
-NeoTomba
I mean, it beats starting a land war of mineral deposits.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
If their going to go as far as start mining on Mars, then why not just colonize it and start up some industry and communities there.
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
I guess this is a dumb observation. I wonder how heavy our planet would become in 50 years?
Oh wait, we saw that in Alpha Centauri. I thought we needed nanotube before we were allowed to reseach this technology.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
One of my co-workers was telling me that NASA is also actively researching the possible drilling for petroleum on other planets (Mercury comes to mind, IIRC). He said that there are a lot of ways that "fossil" fuels could have been generated on other planets through chemical reactions between the soil and the atmosphere and the responsible research group would like send a few probes out in the coming years to investigate the possibility.
Although an incentive for continued reliance on petroleum is a Bad Thing(tm) for the environment, alternative energy research, and noise, it is nice to see that there may be a breakthrough that helps ease our pain when we run out of oil on Earth.
~wally
Good cuz I've been in need of some dilithium crystals and I can't find em anywhere...
I just read the article, and the big unanswered question is: WHAT are you going to mine?
Taylor explained that work should focus on the "unusual economics" of planetary ores, including the relationship of lunar and Martian development to each other.
Unusual economics is a good euphimism for "ungodly expensive", especially in transport costs. Whatever we're mining, it would have to be extremely valuable per ounce, right?
Aggregate will be an important resource on both the Moon and Mars. Here on Earth, it is the most mined material in the United States, at some 2.3 billion tons a year. It is used for roads, concrete, bridges, roofing materials, and glass
Aggregate? Not Iridium, Gold, Plutonium, Scandium, or "rare earth" metals so expensive we haven't even heard of them? AGGREGATE? Rock?
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton right now. A metric ton of aggregate crap... you can mine out of my back yard.
I must be missing something.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
So how exactly would these resources be returned to earth? We're pretty good at launching big things into orbit. But I think the descent of these resources would need to be a little more controlled than MIR dropping into the ocean.
Of course we could just drop them into the ocean, and then mine them again.
We could probably adapt some of our terrestial robotic mining technology for this.
:)
(Blatant plug, I know!
That's good thinking on NASA's part, because after being cooped up in a spaceship on a multi-month trip to Mars, I'd be in a mood for a few hours with any 'ore I could find.
Ba Dum Bum.
...Or any other of a hundred disasters waiting to happen.
One of the big, big problems I see with interplanetary mining is the inherent possibilities for danger in the celestial shipment process.
Say you mine an Iron-rich asteroid, and then send the packets of ore back home to earth via a cheap, long-trajectory orbit. How easy would it be to hijack huge chunks of ore from their trajectories and then fire them at the enemy of your choice on the planet with the aid of a rail gun.
I'm not a engineer, but I've seen enough 'build your own railgun' pages out there to know that it would be fairly easy and cheap for any given interplanetary free-lancer to build such a weapon in orbit.
There is also a high probability of space accidents. With all that ore just floating around, someone is bound to hit it sooner or later. Worse, suppose that the mining activities send large-enough chunks of poorly aimed metal-rich debris toward earth? Worse, suppose mining activities affect the orbit of certain Near-Earth Asteroids.
Asteroid and Planetary mining is a very good thing, because it will help save the Earth's environment, provide massive amounts of employment and wealth on Earth. Unfortuneately, there are very serious risks that should be addressed before mining begins.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Another question is whether these space resources would be used for construction up there, or sent back here... if sent back here, I can see now the inane claims of Greens that, while we'd be using less of the Earth's own bounty, we'd be dangerously adding mass to the Earth with "unknown consequences"...
Love the earlier reference to Larry Niven... always worth going back and reading his stuff.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Don't forget how this would free us of dependence on foreign oil. We would be able to retaliate against states like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and others who support terrorism, without fear of cutting off our own oil supply. Think about it...
I suspect that more resources are going to be needed. And a bit of terraforming to make it much more sustainable. You want to be able to have the thing last on it's own, sustain itself and grow.
This gets into things like altering the paths of comets so that they crash into Mars depositing all kinds of extra water into the place. But that raises all kinds of questions. For example there is this old debate on if the earth is being constantly pelted on by mini-comets. If this is happening on Earthe, what is going on at mars?
All kinds of things to talk about.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Nothing ever collected in space has ever been practically useful. Dust, rocks, etc. were only used as research material, and then only back on earch. In effect, when it comes to space travel, we've always carried a sack lunch, and tend to pack out our trash.
In Earth's history, voyages of discovery have always taken enough supplies to get them to their destination, then they used indiginous resources to keep going. How far could Columbus (nasty Eurotrash that he was) have kept going if he'd had to get back before his food ran out?
Mining operations in space needn't be self-sufficient to represent a new era in space exploration; they need only become marginally profitable, and we'll be over the hump. The new "New World" will begin to move past the exploration phase, and on to exploitation and settlement. Thank God we aren't carrying smallpox around anymore.
The article seems to make a pretty big assumption.. that it's already easy to get back and forth between large bodies in space. Only thing I saw getting close to the subject was harvesting resources on the remote site and turning it into fuel for a return trip.
;) Is the solar system just one big resource waiting for us to come take it.. or should we enter the ordeal of a mind to preserve something that's been there for billions of years?
Other than that though it completely glazes over this problem. Most of our space travel right now relies on coasting around gravity fields of the sun and planets, and the result this has is that travel takes a really freaking long time. The obvious solution would be to make sure each shipment is worth the wait.. but then you run into the problems of carting an aircraft carrier sized ship around the solar system.
Methods of gathering the resources is a good discussion to be having, but the issue of transportation is a lot more fundamental and will need to be answered first. Us humans gotta develop a way to get between earth/moon/mars with a reasonable timetable and budget before we can seriously debate the idea of mining the solar system.
Of course one could argue that you just use the resources where you mine them and then worry about exporting the products, but that just complicates things.. at that point you not only have to worry about shipping stuff around, you have to worry about building up a full ecology at the remote site.
And let's not forget to consider the words of whatisface in the matrix likening humans to parasites who do nothing but expand and consume.
It costs quite a bit of money just to put a pound of mass into orbit. Just looking for a quick ballpark, I found http://www.orbit6.com/et/ngfido94.htm which asserts:
So it's about US$1.875M to launch one ton of mass into orbit (best case.) Therefore one ton of, say, iron in orbit is worth whatever a ton of iron is worth normally, PLUS some fraction of US$1.875M.
If you're building things for space, the best way to go is to build them IN space, which should cut their cost dramatically. We shouldn't forget about reusing the shuttle's bigass tanks, which NASA says they can do for free, and supposedly will do for anyone who is willing to do something responsible with them. We should be thinking of ways to use those tanks to do something clever WRT space-based mining, because they're cheap. Perhaps one should build some sort of machining facility, and a smelter; Having done that it should be possible to make ISS parts or similar. This would save huge piles of money, because you only have to lift the most specialized components.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...is the moon. Now, IIRC, most of the problems with getting a fusion reactor (smashing atoms together) to work are solved by using Helium-3, He-3. But it's rare enough that minute quantities are sold by Us.Gov at fantastically high prices - they get it from old nuclear bombs, because a component (tritium gas) decays into He-3 (tritium has a half-life of aprox. 13 years).
The surface of the moon is rich in He-3.
To hear some tell it, the answer to all our energy problems is strip-mining the surface of the moon...
This is the basis for a bunch of stuff in Manifold Time by Stephen Baxter. He doesn't really go into much detail, but any chance I get to mention Stephen Baxter I will take.
It reminds ME of Niven's Known Space books. Homeworld indeed...
I volunteer to be the first of the Belters.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hey, why bother with a railgun? If your projectile is not in a gravity well (ie, like an asteroid), all you have to do is drop it on somebody's head. Small grans of sand - nice fireworks. Suitcased sized chunks of iron - take out some cars (good luck with the guidance). Asteroid sized stuff - ever hear of that crater near Yucatan? Seen any dinosaurs lately? Nuff said.
The real vaule of this in the next century is probably its use in space colonies or probes themselves (e.g. powerstats or those giant mirrors for making crops grow in Siberia). Except for perhaps dropping an asteroid loaded with platnium into tje Mojave, you're dead on for the expenses.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
It's even better if value is added in site, that is, if manufactured materials are produced in the same site and brought back to earth on demand. It would be useless if you would have to process it on earth, there wouldn't be enough space shuttles in the world for processing the output of a single mine.
It would be even better if you could _consume_ it on site...
It's just a BloJJ
The danger is that this type of system, if it was automated, could easily over-run us.
"Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton right now."
Which is exactly why they don't want to use stuff from Earth. These mined materials are going to be used to fabricate items on the Moon and Mars.
324006
i ran asteroid mining too! that's before we switched to unmanned probes to pluto. both of these plans, btw, were vital to preventing the human race from being wiped out by nuclear war and/or environmental collapse.
yep, i built super-excellent logical reasoning skills in those years.
mod this up so other debaters can chime in.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
I don't know if anyone remembers this earlier slashdot article, which also discussed the matter of mining space. It also mentioned that one near earth asteroid (NEO 3554 Amun, about 2km wide) that was worth about 20 trillion dollars. Mind you that's in today's market, but I'd say there is more than enough economic incentive to go for it. I don't understand why NASA hasn't already - just one rock could solve their many budgetary woes for years to come, would be a tremendously telegenic venture, and would stimulate practical space technologies tremendously...
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I read today that Bush and Putin are talking about getting rid of a lot of nukes. So why not put them to use?
Build an Orion, which is basically a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs. Imagaine a giant, upside down bowl with a hab unit and storage up on the top of it. Build the bowl out of a buttload of heavy metals, reinforce it with cooling units and shock dampners, and then set off as succession of nukes beneath it. That ship would move, I guarantee it. Great way to get a few hundered thousand (maybe even millions) of pounds of construction material into space quickly.
Read 'Footfall' by Niven for more info on that.
Heavier elements (metals) are more likely to be concnetrated closer to the sun (Mercury and Venus) and lighter elements (hydrogen, etc.) will be more likely to be located further out (note gas giants are the outermost planets formed along with our solar system-- Pluto being explicitly included as a captured object).
Some iron, maybe a little nickel would be available. However, I think that water (being lighter) would also the first target because it gives a lot of versatility for a mission, from life support (O2 and H20) to propulsion.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I remember debating the Idea in Highschool Debates
As well as I. I went to highschool not to long ago, but my school was populated with save the planet wannabes. When it was brought up in class, kids would say stuff like "mining is the worst thing that you can do" or when I talked about strip mining an asteroid it was "do you know what a strip mine does to the eco-system?"
I mean come on how stupid can you be...those statements are about as dumb as one kid who was appalled when we discussed nuclear fission engines in the space shuttle to mars "but what if there is a melt down, think of all the radiation and toxic pollution!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
. . . is plain old cost. Because the two biggest factors raising the cost of putting things in space are 1) overcoming Earth's gravity and 2) overcoming the friction from Earth's atmosphere. If mining the moon, the costs 1) is a lot less and 2) non-existent. There is some set up cost and an overhead but one doesn't have to go for just the rarest of minerals to make a profit (or save money/resources). As in all real estate, the rules are a) location, b) location and c) location.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
A stupid idea! The energy required to get the oil out of the gravity well of whatever
planet it's on (Titan is a likely place to find it) and back to Earth far exceeds the
energy content of the oil itself. No way is NASA seriously considering it - and if it
is then I'm going to have to start working somewhere else, because it must have been taken over by idiots.
Ok ok, it sounds like a joke (or a troll even), but seriously.. think about it. How many cons sitting on Death Row wouldn't love to go into the history books for being the first person on Mars. Tell them up front: 'Look, you are gonna die by lethal injection in 10 years, why not help the world and be famous by dying on Mars?' He could be trained to send back data as he goes in, and maybe, after a few dozen or so cons have been, we can get one to survive on the planet surface for awhile.
Seriously.. this isn't a troll. It sounds crazy, but as long as we are killing people, we might as well get some use out of them. And I am sure quite a few death row inmates would rather be remembered for helping mankind get to mars than for killing a few people in a convience store robbery.
I don't know.. maybe I just haven't had enough coffee yet this morning.. just an idea.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
... instantly came to my mind when I read the heading. :-)
... this is just asking for an AI takeover of all these mines by low-polygon robots which seem to have equipped themselves with missles.
We have now 'robotic miners', plans to make mines on other planets/moons
The damn robot generator sections were always a pain in the ass though, and at least I haven't read about any plans for that.
I just love how in that game you could be shooting insane amounts of missles, and no mine shafts would collapse.
But, what about self sufficiency for a space colony? Robinson's Mars series points out how any colony that becomes self sufficient is destained to become its own nation (think of the U.S. colonies in 1776). Extraterretial mining technology would be the first step in that direction.
Most SF on the topic (including Robison) focuses on a revolution scenario, with Earth trying to maintain its grip on the colony in question. On the other hand, skeptics of human space colonization say colonies will never happen beacause they cost too much and will drain resources from Mother Earth over the long term.
What if they're both wrong? Would Earth be willing to front a large, but finite, amount of cash to set up a colony with the understanding that it would one day become an independant political entity and not an ongoing drain on resources? Would immigrants be more willing to join up, and front some of their own capital, with this promise of independance when "the mortgage is paid off"?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The best reference on using space resources is
still the report 'Advanced Automation for
Space Missions', several copies of which are
online.
Next best is the series of 'Space Manufacturing N'
conference reports (where N=1 to 12 or so).
Dani Eder
I read somewhere a long time ago that mining asteroids would eventually reap such huge quantities of resources that poverty and perhaps even money itself would become a thing of the past. Obviously I'm short on details, but like I said it's been a long time and I don't remember where I saw the story. I'm just wondering whether anyone here knows how that would be possible. I'm still hoping for a Star-Trek-ish economy to come along in my lifetime. Meaning the labor-work no one wants would be done by machines, other jobs would be done by people who enjoy doing them for their own benefit, and the only purpose in life is self-improvement and happiness. A slacker's paradise.
The process eventually would need to involve a bunch of posts, minimizing fuel expenditures and making sure that any one vehicle serves only its one purpose... but the initial outlay of cash would eventually turn into a very very profitable business.
The question was originally whether it's worth doing this kind of thing given that the world has bigger problems to deal with, but when you look at it from a business perspective, it could be a very plausible (if not hideously expensive) venture unlike anything history has ever seen.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
This discussion of space mining is pure sci-fi dreaming.
The world can barely muster up enough political will and economic support to maintain one space station with three people on it. Even the space station plan has been cut way back from its original scope. You can forget about seeing extensive space mining or any other other kind of major escalation of space efforts as long as the current economics and attitudes prevail.
IMHO, extensive exploration of space will only start happening when it's no longer the governments of the world that are paying for it.
-- Spike
Although many researchers have insisted that we will run out of petroleum by the year 2050 (or earlier), their calculations are fueled by coarse-grained extrapolation and bad science run amok. What many environmentalists do to advance their anti-oil cause is extrapolate oil use increases on 25-year or 50-year periods. For instance, they will find that oil use has increased (say) 250% from 1950 through 2000. And conclude that use will increase another 250% between 2000 and 2050.
Obviously that is not the case. The usage increases were huge when the nation became industrialized and started needing more energy, but it is ludicrous to think that the rate of change will remain constant. That is like saying that since the number of homes with PCs has increased by 1500% since 1985, it will increase another 1500% by 2017.
-all dead homiez
"I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton right now. A metric ton of aggregate crap... you can mine out of my back yard."
Actually the costs to LAUNCH is "only" ~$2600/kg. That's $2.6 million/tonne, that's 3 orders of magnitude less than you quoted. And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
But that's launch. There's many reasons to think that space transport is going to be many times cheaper than that- if you use space resources to move around; IN space, rather than getting INTO space, the costs are much, much lower. For one thing, reusable interplanetary craft are pretty trivial to design- fully reusable launch vehicles are harder.
Incidentally, some materials are 'ungodly' expensive. Check out the price of platinum group materials- they run at over $500/ounce.
Oh yeah, BTW the underlying cost of launching something into space are under $10/kg. That's more than the fuel costs. We're a long way from that at the moment- but from my studies, there's a pretty convincing argument that that's mainly because the launch rate is so low right now (the costs are, surprisingly, roughly fixed, and amortise across the amount of launched mass).
I'm expecting the launch cost to go down by atleast 4x in the next ten years, and to do the same in the ten years after that. That will put Space Tourism in the ballpark of a Concorde flight.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"...mining space, come get the 'cosmic dirt' out of my living room!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
before we ruin all the other planets in space
we should focus on earth right now.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
All these people talking about how it's not possible. The common thread through most of these people's messages is that they are hung up on some sort of technical concern.
This is nasa. They are good with technical concerns.
Yes, it's going to take some work. No, it probably wont actually happen for 20-30 years. But it could happen. It most likely will too. Eventually earth will run out of stuff and we'll have to.
The posting implies that NASA is leading these studies. Not at all. It's primarily the academic community and non-profits like the Space Studies Institute and the National Space Society. NASA generally puts its mouth where its money is, and that's the ISS, which does little or nothing to help advance the cause of space development.
Given the very poor ROI of the ISS, who would seriously trust NASA to lead the way on lunar, asteroid and cometary resource exploitation? The best they can do is sponsor science missions so that we can understand what these resources are and where. In fact, they are doing that.
Like any conference, there will be loads of good and not so good ideas presented, but the fundamental logic is the same: it makes no sense to build things in space with materials brought from the ground. There are loads of materials on the moon (and no biosphere to damage) that have the potential to supply a large proportion of a spacefaring civilization. Big question is, do we want to be a spacefaring civilization?
Helium balloons want to be free.
WHY!!! Damnit, bring up 19 more women instead!!!!
:)
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I never like short term solutions over long term solutions.
IF we get in the habit or scrounging up every bit of good minerals/power from everywhere near us, we will leave a trail of trash wherever we go. In 1000 years do we want a string of dead solar systems pointing to us, who now need a galaxy's power for a few star systems?
Bah. We need to learn efficiency.
short term good sucks.
It doesn't matter how much any random asteriod is worth if you can't get to it.
The cost of launching a payload is the bottleneck for all forms of space exploration, manned or unmanned. Check here for an interesting read about launch costs. I don't agree with everything the author says, but he raises some salient points.
Asteriod mining, missions to Mars and the outer planets, a return to the Moon - all these are wonderful ideas, but until the cost of a ride to orbit comes down, it's all academic.
---------------
Vpered na Mars!
Of course, the English did this with Australia, which is ironic. I mean, they shipped away all these criminals whose descendants wound up living on an entire continent surrounded with incredible natural beauty, massive resources, and much better weather. I guess punishment is in the eye of the beholder...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Seen any dinosaurs?
Umm, yes. But we call them birds now.
"On the Moon, we want to look at those lunar polar regions, where there may be hydrogen concentrations...water ice, perhaps"
Water is far more valuable for being water than for being a source of hydrogen. Mining the ice on the moon for propellant is stupid and short-sighted. The moon has very little water and that water will be needed to support eventual human colonies on the moon.
There is a real danger that missions to the moon in the near future will use the water ice to make propellant and lower their cost. I don't think that wasting this water is a good idea... the Moon is the only water source near Earth that won't cost you hefty launch costs. This lunar water will be valuable to lunar colonies as well as colonies on asteroids and in orbit around the Earth as it will be much easier to get than water from Earth or Mars.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
You're partly right: the deuterium-helium-3 fusion reaction has the advantage that no neutrons are produced. This reaction, however, requires higher temperatures than deuterium-tritium fusion, and is more technologically challenging than deuterium-tritium fusion.
Having said that, I work on a fusion experiment. Its configuration is such the deuterium-helium-3 reaction may be required to make a workable reactor, and the notion of mining He-3 from the moon has been a subject of serious discussion
If you strip mine an asterioid, you are simply taking a small boulder off the asteroid belt, not destroying a world.
In a sense, you could use the hollowed-out asteroid to build a colony inside, has the asterioid been ruined?
Don't apply Earth ecological concerns to other planets because they don't apply!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Are you thinking that aggregate would be mined on the moon and then shipped back to Earth? If that's what you're thinking, I can understand your incredulity. It would make no economic sense whatsoever.
However, the customer for that mined material would be the local moon colony. For that customer, it's much less expensive to use local resources than to use material launched from Earth. Mass costs $10,000 per pound to launch into low earth orbit, and even more to land on the surface of the moon.
Please do a little -- no, a lot -- of research on the concept of "gravity wells," and you will understand both the challenges, and the incredible opportunities offered by the industrialization of space.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
With enough lead time, we could mine down an Earth approacher until it was small enough to divert.
It's the 10 km comets coming out of nowhere with only months of lead time that are frightening. Of course, by establishing a continuous presence in interplanetary space, this will lead us to develop other technologies that will allow us to destroy asteroid/comet threats in a shorter time frame.
So, I'm all for it. I'd much rather grab methane ice from some space rock than blast the top off a mountain in West Virginia. Of course, I'm sure the environmentalist wackos will figure out some way to make asteroid mining politically incorrect. On the up side, maybe they will chain themselves to the asteroids.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"Earth First! (We'll mine the other planets later.)"
Funny part is I went to the Colo School of Mines - which held the first summit to discuss the econmics of space mining last year.
Another thing is that when/if we establish fully functional mining colonies on the moon, the next stage will be to create the industrial resources there on the moon to construct and launch spacecraft. There's some startup costs getting materials there for the first few spacecraft... but construction and launches should both be much more efficient in a low gravity environment. Those first ships can then hopefully lead to cheaper mining elsewhere (Mars?) for raw materials to build more in space, leading to progressively less and less launches from Earth.
11*43+456^2
In any kind of 'asteroid mining', the venture would be taken in the first place for profit. It'd be a process of 'go to asteroid, grab asteroid, bring it back.' End of mission. There would be none of this maintainence like what they have to do for the IIS; just go, grab, and bring back for (hopefully) profit. If seen as economically feasible, operations would grow from there, with money prompting growth and improvement.
I'm certainly not an expert, but this is how I think things might be done. Probe to asteroid, which would wind up straping a small booster to the asteroid, and move it into an earth orbit (picking a small one for starters, of course). With the Apollo program, we know we can handle free-fall re-entry of things the size of the Apollo command capsule. Strap on some small manuvering thrusters, main recovery parachutes, and some kind of inflatable recovery for when it hits the water. Send up a convex heatshield in segments in the Space Shuttle, assembled by the crew in space, attach to asteroid. Have the heatshield work much like the Apollo command capsule; proportionate to keep the center of gravity where it needs to be, and big enough in diameter so the asteroid stays in the shield's slipstream (I guess that's the best word for what I'm thinking). Manuevering thrusters get it into position and send it down, letting gravity and air resistance do their work.
It won't stay in space, we just don't have the facilities/capabilities. First 'mined asteroids' will need to be brought down to earth until we figure out what the hell we're going to do with 'em, how we can do it in space, and if it'll be economically feasible to even bother with. If things fail and it burns up in the atmosphere (with the manuevering thrusters, it's downward path will be generally 'guided' (we hope) into the ocean anyways if it doesn't burn up), no big loss, maybe just some brief, bad press. If it's some kind of manned operation and things screw up... someone would have hell to pay when the media gets hold of them.
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
by John S. Lewis - it's an excellent introduction this fascinating opportunity:
9 4/ qid=1005767931/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_3_4/102-7649417-063 6122
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/02013281
In asteroid space, I would say we really should have two goals.
The first is economic use of the asteroids in a way that gets us off this rock.
The second is to establish better observation and mapping of possible collision objects that might impact the earth and their diversion before impact.
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--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The amount of Earth mass we convert to energy on a daily basis would FAR outweigh anything we actually ADDED to our planet. We are losing mass at what would seem an incredible speed, but when you look at the numbers, this planet is far too massive for us pesky inhabitants to make a mass difference that would alter ANYTHING. Adding to it would only slow the consumption of us humans, as far as mass goes.
Adding to the mass of our planet what (relatively) little we would bring back is merely a sidenote, and nothing of concern, AT ALL. A drop in the ocean if you will.
Kim Stanley Robinson created what has to be the most complete viewpoint on extra-terrestrial mining and the colonization of Mars / solar system. Everything from initial funding to ROI is discussed, and in the tradition of great SciFi writers its all grounded firmly in scientific theory. The story of course is a nice bonus :)
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
by John S. Lewis - it's an excellent introduction this fascinating opportunity:
3 28194/qid=1005767931/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_3_4/102-76494 17-0636122
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201
It seems to be that a civilization advanced enough to have continuous and safe access to a remote lunar/planetary/asteroid station should be able to get materials in other ways than mining, i.e. through synthetic production. There's no reason to say that this kind of mooching off of the universe is necessary for our continued exploration of space. We are essentially planning to continue conventional earth mining on other bodies, only changing the process where it is necessary. We only want to consider this idea because it seems like our only choice now, from our current knowledge, but to Renaissance Europeans, the only way to Asia was east.
Moon has nothing of economic value except for He3 and Thorium reserves. Everything else is more readily accessible on earth. Water is easy to recyle and produce in little quantities and if small quantities are not enough it is next to impossible to transport large water supplies from anywhere, including the moon, anyway. Even when you have to transport huge quantities, the best source for water are comets, not moon. Mars has high water ice reserves in one of its polar regions too (I guess the southern one was rich) and mars is suited to human colonization, surpassing moon in all respects, except for distance. Don't be so romantic about the moon, mars is a much nicer place. And she looks better too :)
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
I would think the trick would be mining raw materials and doing all the processing in space for use in space projects. IE: Decrease the ammount of material we're putting into space.
Secondly, if you DID want the materials on earth, I would think it would be nearly free to bring it back. For small ammounts you could just load up the shuttle (It usually leaves cargo in space anyway, must have some extra weight allowance). For large ammounts just mold it into a large, hollow cone or sphere shaped nugget so the atmosphere will slow it down--After it's going slow enough, deploy a huge parachute and drop it into the drink. Retrieve at your leisure.
Yes, a space infarstructure would be necessary to see any benefit from extra-terrestrial mining. So appropriately they should start thinking about it now while materials are not yet depleted on Earth
The only problem with your plan is that each ship will have to be single-use. This is the same reason why the Apollo program was so goddamed expensive...single-serve rocket, single-server lunar module, single-serve command module.
I suppose it could work. But engineering a machine that won't burn up in the atmosphere is no simple, cheap task. And have you checked out how expensive and time-consuming an operation it was to raise that Russian submarine out of the drink? Consider the size of the operation required to salvage a continuous, useful quantity of ore from the ocean depths where it crashed down.
I'm just thinking of this from an economics perspective. I have no particular love for capitalism, however most people won't let it go without a fight, and we've seen what happens when the world market takes a massive dump. And raw materials that are too expensive are just as bad as no raw materials at all ... either will cause growth to halt and capitalism to fail.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x
more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
This figure is true regardless of what it costs to launch something. If it costs a dollar to launch something into orbit, it will cost about $10 to produce the thing being launched. The problem is engineering and volume. Say you have a satellite to produce. Its going to cost you $50 Million to launch it and if it broke down on orbit, it would take another launch to replace it. Youre going to be much more willing to spend alot of time and money to make darn sure the satellite will work for 10-15 years than if it cost $500 to launch it. If it cost $500 to launch a satellite, you wouldnt need to worry about station keeping, you wouldnt need to worry about rad hard hardware, you wouldnt need to worry about fault tolerent software. If it breaks, just throw another one up there. The cost of launch and the cost of satellites are linked. Launch costs cannot go down much further with current technology, any more than propeller planes can break the sound barrier. You are limited by the rocket equation. V=-g0*Isp*ln(r) where r is the ratio between the payload mass and the initial mass of the rocket. The best Isp rocket engine we can muster right now is 433 seconds. Until we can beat that and still have enough thrust to get off the ground, the current situation wil remain. We need a propulsion breakthrough, plain and simple.
At first i was going to blast you for being a troll, but then i realized that you may be right despite yourself. There is quite a bit of "fossil" fuel out in space, but its not petroleum. In fact i would wager your friend never mentioned the P word, and im absolutely certain that NASA didnt. you see, Natural gas is a so called "fossil" fuel, and natural gas is almost 100%, you guessed it, Methane. And Methane is one of the more common compunds in the solar system, since the four hydrogens and one carbon can get together all by themselves without any interference by life. In fact the first atmosphere of earth is thought to have been methane instead of oxygen and nitrogen. So your friend is right, there are fossil fuels out there, specifically in comets and cometary remnants, but dont expect oil. And dont expect to get rich mining it either, currently we have more methane than we know what to do with, it bubbbles up with oil, and most drilling rigs, at least in the ocean, burn it off, since its too expensive to capture and ship.
This is just another attempt by NASA to propose an open-ended project with no reasonably obtainable goal. Translation: assured funding. NASA learned what happens when you achieve a goal. Land men on the moon and then everyone gets laid off. So they came up with the space shuttle with the goal of a cheap, re-usable launch vehicle. It is not as cost-effective as single-use rockets. The ISS is poorly designed and does little research because the inmates spend most of the time fixing the computers. But it will be there for years. Then they foist some bad science on us claiming a Martian meterorite showed evidence of life. Ooops! It was terrestrail contamination and quickly proven so once subjected to independant verification. Now they are proposing mining? My background is geological engineering so I know a little bit about mineral resources. Extraterrestrial mining will not be economical under foreseeable conditions. Mineral resources require extensive treatment to recover anything of value. First, you have to extract the ore. For a pricy end-product, this means extracting large volumes of ore. For instance, we mine gold that goes 0.04 onces per ton. Second, you have to crush it, requiring energy and large mechanical equipment. Ever seen a rod mill? Oh yeah, the rods rely upon weight -- gravity -- to have the force to crush rock. Third, you have to concentrate the valuable minerals. For any kind of high value/weight product, this almost certainly requires a large volume of liquid water. Or you could set up a shaker table and hope gravity seperation is effective. You also need a large plant for the equipment. Fourth, and finally, you have to extract the product. This typically requires more water and plenty of energy. Oh yes, and more equipment. All of this takes a staff of people who do little things that people like to do; you know, eat, drink, breathe... Mining is, for the most part, a barely profitable industry right here on earth. Now the engineers who brought us ISS are proposing to mine extraterrestrial ores? This is not going to happen. But it is another reason to give NASA money to map the solar system in detail we will not use for any practical purpose. But mining is more believable as a practical use of billions of dollars than the search for extraterrestrial life.
The prospect of mining bulk raw materials from space resources and returning them to Earth is economically impossible.
It will always be cheaper to mine or recycle materials here on Earth, if they exist here, with the possible exception of immensely valuable materials for which there is a solid demand.
I can believe a tonne of pure iridium or platinium being economically viable to tranship to Earth from space, but unrefined ore no way.
How are these going to be bought back from orbit ? Any object orbitting Earth has a min velocity of approx 18000 km/hr. Put a drag parachute on them and glide them in like the shuttle after an initial rocket thrust ? I for one don't like the idea of thousand of tonnes of metal moving at sub-orbital velocity passing overhead frequently. Bringing back small quantities is only viable for immensely valuable commodities, large quantities is just too dangerous (unless you have an orbital tower !).
Don't think mining , think meteor impacts.
Mining for space uses is a much better idea, using zero gee to move mass and never taking it into a gravity well.
As for the Mars mining idea, check Robert Zubrin's Mars landers plans which make a lot of sense. Essnetially Zubrin's scheme is to land on Mars a plant that manufactures rocket fuel before a human crewed vessel arrives, so the astronauts can be assured of a back up vehicle and fuel for their departure.
Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks
Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.
Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.
We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.
-AD
Let's see. The size of the oceans is approx 1,300,000,000 km^3 of water. The density of sea water is between 1.0 and 1.1 tonnes/m^3, so the mass of water is approx 1.3*10^9*(10^3)^3 tonnes = 1.3*10^18 tonnes.
The average metal concentration of sea water is:
Cu: 150 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Au: 0.02 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Pd: 0.04 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Rh: 0.08 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Metal prices, in rough numbers:
Cu: 0.64 us$/lb = 1.410 us$/kg
Au: 278 us$/oz = 8.90 us$/g
Pd: 360 us$/oz = 11.60 us$/g
Rh: 1600 us$/oz = 51.50 us$/g
So the in-situ value of these four metals are:
Cu: 1.3*10^18 t * 150 mg/t / 10^6 * 1.4 $/kg = 2.73*10^14 us$
Au: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.02 mg/t / 1000 * 8.9 $/g = 2.31*10^14 us$
Pd: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.04 mg/t / 1000 * 11.6 $/g = 6.03*10^14 us$
Rh: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.08 mg/t / 1000 * 51.5 $/g = 53.56*10^14 us$
So the insitu value of these 4 metals exceeds US$64,000 Trillion! Who needs a freaking space program to supply metals to earth?
-AD
So we throw some comets at the moon and suck up the debris. Environmental impact statment takes on a new meaning with a multi-billion tonne impact on a site with no environment, n'est-pas?
-AD
How do you figure that? I don't feel like doing the math right now, but departing the earth-moon gravity well to go to mars should take more energy than departing the earth gravity well to get to the moon. The only way I can see lower fuel is if you use aerobraking at the end of the trip, and that is something that you DON'T want to do with a human crew. Retro-rockets are more reliable than aerobraking.
-AD
I guess there would have to be some kind of restriction on how much extra ore we could import to earth to avoid leaving our trajectory around the sun?
It would be like the planet in "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", where a planet hugely popular with space turists had to incur regulations on people food intake and defecation during the visit to the planet.
-.sig sauer-
That is news to me too, but when you look from the sun central perpective it may be possible. You have to escape from earth's gravity in any case, so you can forget about that when comparing. Escaping earth-moon gravity well is almost equal to escaping from earth's gravity (when you depart from earth, you already have sufficient speed escape the system and quite a bit of distance from moon anyway), so you can forget about that too. Then going to moon means slowing down for moon capture while going to mars means speeding up to raise orbit and catch mars. If the speed difference between earth and mars is little enough, this may take less fuel. You can also do some fuel saving by using lagrange points, or use venus slingshot but neither would be feasible for a manned mission because of prolonged misson times. In any case I'm sure somebody did work out the numbers, and I'll dig them in the evening to find out for sure.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Capitalism: Screw those who are not greedy enough to want to exploit others, and screw those who don't want to play by our rules.