Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
It will also allow for the environmental hassles of mining on Earth to be less of a factor.
It will also introduce the environmental hassles of bringing extra-terrestrial materials to Earth.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
"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!"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.
The counter argument is that the asteroid isn't much more valuable than the rock in your backyard- it has much the same abundances; although more platinum group metals.
But the counter-counter argument is that the asteroid has something you don't have in your backyard- a continuous supply of mostly free solar energy. Smelting on the earth is enormously expensive. Smelting at an asteroid only needs a big sheet of foil and you can obtain ~5000C.
Solar ovens give 1.6 kw/m^2. That's a lot. On earth solar power is less than 1/6 of that due to weather, oblique angles, atmospheric effects and this phenomena called 'nighttime'. 200 watts isn't much. 1.6kw is getting respectable.
(And no- solar ovens are not hard to build- they don't require any kind of high precision; but they are not used much on earth chiefly because of weather and mounting/pointing issues, in zero gravity this is not an issue.)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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!
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
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
At $400 million per launch to get the shuttle into near-earth orbit, how much will it cost to bring home these "precious" minerals?
You missed the point. The point is not to spend $400 million launching stuff into near earth orbit. The point is to try and use stuff that is already their to launch stuff farther into space. The ISS is built 100% from stuff on earth. And, every single kilogram was launched from Earth into orbit. If we had a source of material and manufacturing in orbit, some of that material would not have needed to be launched from Earth. Eliminating some of those $400 million launches.
The real problem is that most of the plans keep skipping the moon. We need to start from the moon because it is closer and therefore cheaper. We need to explore it completely to figure out what resources are available, where, and what can be done with them. Then, we launch the minimum amount of people, equipment, and material to exploit the lunar reqources and build a self sustaining mining and manufacturing operation.
Supposedly there are a lot of very useful materials that could be manufactured in 0G that cannot be done under gravity. By moving production of space stations to the moon where the lower surface gravity and lack of air will make launching much cheaper, we could build a space station much larger than the ISS that could be used to manufacture materials that are impossible to manufacture under gravity. Those materials could be dropped form the station to Earth at very low cost. Especially, if everything except people are received from the moon.
Dastardly