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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.
"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
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
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.
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"
Surely the primary focus of "Exterrestrial Mining" would be to produce raw materials needed for space exploration and colonization, not just to bring it back to Earth in lieu of terrestrial sources?
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.'"
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.
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 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!
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.
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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."
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.
Possibly.. But the Wisconsin cheese lobbyists will never stand for it...
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
"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 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.
And you need to see past the end of your nose. The USA isn't the only country in the world.
How many BILLIONS of people in India and China don't even own a bicycle let alone a car? These countries (along with dozens more) are very eager to catch up to the 'west' in technology -> which implies a huge grown in energy demand.
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."
Reminds me of the part in Douglas Adams' HHGTTG about the planet where God left "his final message to his creation" (sorry, can't remember the name):
They were so concerned about the planetary mass erosion caused by countless tourists that you had to "get receipts" when you used the lavatory, and any difference between what you brought/took away was "surgically removed" from your body. q:]
Hope it wouldn't come to that, but in large enough scales, it definately would be a concern.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
"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
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
Eventually, yes. But how do we get from here to there? Once there are space colonies and so forth being built, then it makes sense to use on-orbit materials. But I don't see any today. (The ISS doesn't count - it was made with 100% Earth materials - but maybe a future version of it would.)
More to the point, they won't exist until after some profit comes from space to Earth to fund the development of things needed to build them. One possibility: mining platinum-group metals for use on Earth, since they are valuable in and of themselves on Earth. Leave the rock, and maybe the iron and nickel, up there for later when we get around to building colonies. But bring that shiny pricey metal down here so we can pay off our creditors today, so that we can build space colonies tomorrow!
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
mars is suited tohuman colonization, surpassing moon in all respects, except for distance.
Interesting fact about the moon and mars. The moon may be closer to the earth, but the amount of delta-v required to go to mars is less than that required to go to the moon. This means that radio signals and astronauts will take longer to get to mars, but they will need less fuel per unit mass to do it.
An interesting corollary is that there is no way to economically make use of the moon as an intermediate stop on the way to mars, even if you had the fuel just sitting there ready to be used at zero cost.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
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.
I don't know orbital mechanics, but the quoted figures I've seen for this have made that assumption.
Why not? Don't we do aerobraking every time we deorbit the Space Shuttle?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I thought it was cheaper because the Earth and Mars are both orbiting the Sun, while the Moon is orbiting the earth. Sort of like it would be easier to hop between two parallel trains at slightly different speeds than to jump from one train to another traveling perpendicular to the first.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
How many tonnes of space crudd fall on the earth each day?