Slashdot Mirror
Is Space Mining Feasible?
Roland Piquepaille writes "There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Moon and Mars. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Earth? Space.com says that mining specialists and space engineers, who gathered at the latest Space Resources Roundtable, think the answer is yes. But there are many issues to solve. The first one is to build a permanent base. Then, you have to live on space resources. The article looks at other issues, such as strategic and economic potentials, before examining legal concerns about working conditions and extraterrestrial resource ownership. As the article says about lawyers, it 'turns out you can't leave Earth without them.' This summary contains more details and a rendering of a possible commercial Lunar base."
Just imagine all the cheese from the moon!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
...please submit your application to Eve-Online.
Is Space Mining Feasible?
No, now let's move on to understanding R2D2'a beeps and whistles.
Oh, that has been settled too?
Okay, meeting over, have a nice day.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Won't this eventually alter the gravitational balances that keep everything cool in terms of orbits and what not?
I'd be a little concerned because we generally are very bad at stopping ourselves once we get started (e.g. burning dead dinosaurs, eating Twinkies...)
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Yes.
Practically?
No.
Who ever said we needed to go to have people? It seems with todays advancements in robitics it would be much more effecient to have robots controled by humans down on earth to set about the task of space mining. You also eliminate a large amount of problems with staining life outside of our atmosphere.
Food for thought...
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Moon and Mars.
Is there?
Tell Bush there are weapons of mass destruction on Mars.
Maybe this will be the final push thats needed to get Nasa the funding it needs. I may be alone in thinking this, but I believe that Nasa is solely responsible for America being where it is today. Think about how many innovations came out of the space program. What Nasa does today fuels the industries of tomorrow.
Or maybe I'm just asking to be modded as offtopic.
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
Another reason to spend meelions of dollars on something that might not even prove fruitful. Woohoo.
lots of information, run by 1 guy though
http://www.permanent.com/
sig: 6E8C 8721 B3D9 5269 5A9B 1122 00C3 C03D 99A7 1CFC
6E8C 8721 B3D9 5269 5A9B 1122 00C3 C03D 99A7 1CFC
Biodome... IN SPACE!
Does this mean we'll be shipping Pauly Shore off-planet sometime soon?
Building space stations from moon rock would be easier than building them from Earth rock.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
Why build a perm. base? Why not just focus on assembling Von Neumann machines - within the context of the moon's environment - at the macroscopic level (easier that way for now) and do it that way?
I don't understand why humans have to be involved at all, we're far too needy, messy, and inefficient. I mean, if I was John Carmack, a Von Neumann-based mining operation would be my end goal . . .
If you put this into the capitalist's hands, she will necessarily move the minerals as needed to ensure profits, so I wonder what happens when you move enough mass off of the Moon and onto Earth.
Wonder if the movement of mass between the planets by an unnatural force would have any consequence on the stability of the system? Just a question, wondering if there is a simple answer to that.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
But why would you want to? The cost of raw materials on the planet have been getting cheaper and cheaper. The only reason to do space mining is to reduce the costs of getting materials into orbit.
Space mining to get materials for things you want to build in space is fantastic. No more soda can thin walls in your space stations.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
As the article says about lawyers, it 'turns out you can't leave Earth without them.'
Unlike Kennedy, no one speaks of "returning [them] safely to the Earth."
Would it be feasible to carry minerals by aeroplanes? No, it wouldn't, unless they're extremely valuable minerals.
Much less it's feasible to carry them from space, as space travelling is yet much more expensive than flying.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
the solar system's planets and moons and received papers on those claims from the government is looking like he is in for a huge cash cow.........
but then, I am sure eminent domain will kick in and he will get a 10,000 compensation and that will be it.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
We'll just need one of them big Corellian ships to do the transporting. Just as long as we get more than one or two companies doing the work, the last thing we want is a space-aged DeBeers.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
we can barely manage to live on earth without completely trashing our resources. now we are going to start leeching off everything else in the univrse. MAKE IT STOP!!
Get out of space and take care of AIDS, famine, crime, erosion, etc.
No
If you read the article, or even the slashdot blurb, it's talking about making a PROFIT in space, not spending billions and billions into a blackhole.
After the investors make profit in space, nothing says they won't make donations about AIDS, famine, crime, erosion, etc.
Clearly your troll of for another thread, not this one!
Moonbase Alpha? It's been up and running for over 4 years now. It has an efficient transportation system in the Eagles for bringing in the minerals and an enlightened and effective leadership in Commander Koening. I often watch his efforts on my personal viewscreen.
I love the thought of lawyers penetrating into space, exploding in a cloud of court orders and subpoenas as they're jettisoned out of the back of the shuttle.
The question would be if there are "large amounts of precious minerals" on the moon and Mars, would they still be valuable if the market was flooded by these new sources?
We'll have no choice once the Ur-Quan enslave our world and force us to mine planets to make RU. So we better get to work on this.
It was just a suggestion....
Ahhhh.. the power of Cheese!
Dr. Robert Zubrin has suggested that there could be a new traingle trade with the astriod belt, Mars and Earth. Since it takes a lot less effort to get to the belt from Mars, a base there makes the most sense.
Earth -> high tech to Mars
Mars -> mining equiptment, low tech goods and food to the belt
Astroid belt -> trillions in materials and H3 to Earth
Yet another good reason to get NASA to make Mars a goal.
Blaze a trail to the New World
So if we start taking resources from the moon, on a large scale, won't that cause the earth to increase in mass and the moon to decrease in mass. So, since the total mass is still there, the gravity should be the same. But since the moon would have less mass, would the moon then spin around the earth in a lower/faster orbit or are we just going to mess things up and lose the moon entirely? Is this thought provoking or just funny? Ab_iron
...on likely dates for:
1) Lunar base inhabitant to receive first AOL free trial CD.
2) Lunar base inhabitant to be sent legal letter on behalf of RIAA.
3) Lunar Base computer room to be invoiceed by SCO.
Any takers?
AT&ROFLMAO
You can mine all you want, but you won't be able to import that stuff into fortress America while the Republicans are on guard. Ironic how the US is working out politically isn't it?
Dude I was thinking the same thing. We're screwing with our air to the point where we'll have to artificially maintain the balance vs the damage we cause. What happens when we bring back too many tons of matter to a planet which is precariously spinning round at JUST the right distance from the sun?
most of the mass out there is useless crap, it would all stay where we dig it, the good stuff is so small that it will do nothing in terms of gravitational balance.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Rather than setting up a big nasty industrial complex and the associated suburbs and strip malls has anyone thought of considering the moon and mars, etc. areas which should be preserved rather than exploited.
Until we humans can get our act together here on earth I see no logical reason why we should trash a couple of perfectly beautiful celestial bodies.
Caution: Contents under pressure
and start putting little spikes on asteroids all in the name of righteousness.
America spent what, 2-3 billion dollars to bring a hundred pound of rocks back from the moon. I'm sure they could do the same for Mars, given 50-60 billion dollars. So it's been proven that it is technically feasible. It has also been proven that it is not economically feasible.
Well, maybe that's where Saddam and Bin Laden are hiding!
Only if you think clipping your nose hairs falls under "weight management."
There isn't enough usefull material on the moon that removal to earth would change the moon's mass significantly.
The parent actually makes good points. While I'm all for technological innovation, I believe things like this should only be attempted when all of mankind (yes, even the poor, black people, the hispanics, the asians, the indians, etc...) can benefit. We have a lot to be working on before we go for pie in the sky dreams like this. For one thing, human nature needs some adjustment. We need to find ways to eliminate the selfishness and fear that are the cause of so many of humanity's problems. Until one human can look at any other human and realize that we are all the same and deserve to be treated as such, mining in space is the wrong place to look. I say we start by killing everyone who is a racist.
Resource collection from the moon or Mars is certainly possible, but it would make considerably more sense to use the materials mined/collected to help subsidize the operations which would be necessary for such mining/resource collection to begin with, such as the recently discussed plans to construct two large photovoltaic arrays on opposite sides of the moon and beam the power back to earth via microwaves.
... but bringing large amounts of mass onto the Earth WILL change its orbit. Not that I read the article (in typical slashdot fashion), but if they expect to bring a lot of material here, they had better plan on moving a lot of material out there too.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Wasn't there alot of talk of a certain isotope of helium that can be used for nucleur fusion ?
Here it is Helium-3 but they say it's economically unfeasible.
...until they build a decent pasture for my mare on the Moon!
Mining the moon or Mars makes a lot less sense than mining asteroids for lots of reasons.
an ill wind that blows no good
Could this cause long term issues (gravity, rotation speed, etc.) if we continuously add to the mass of the planet by bringing these materials back?
that's only if bush doesn't feel like watching jupitor explode from his backyard while he's doing that hot laura bush up the poopchute drunk off his ass. whoops.
Especially that Giant Obelisk buried just underneath the surface, waiting for us to discover it.
Moderators, if someone provides a link which does not work properly, they are not being Informative. They are simply posting useless garbage.
Here's the correct link: http://www.permanent.com/.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
sure, if we sent humans. but why not send machines?
the only question left in human space exploration - is do we really need to send -humans- into space?
and the answer to that is currently no. there is nothing in space, aside from studying the effects of spacefaring life on human physiology that couldn't be done (and more efficiently and cheaper) from the ground via robots and drones.
(no food or water requirements, no downtime for sleep, no heating requirements, no oxygen requirements, etc)
studying the effects of spacefaring life on human physiology is made nearly moot by those same automated and remote agents.
humans don't need to leave earth until it is necessary for either population dispersal (to mitigate the effects of a 'killer-asteroid' on our species), pure recreation, or should communication between Earth and our remote explorers be too slow for planning to result in effective utilization.
i think the best possible space program will have the first manned human space flight to Mars - ending with the successful automated landing at a fully-constructed, tested, and verified human-friendly space station -- completed ahead of time fully by machines launched in advance.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I for one welcome our lunar overlords!
I wonder if somebody will suggest mining for coal? ;-)
Is it just me or the first astronaut in this picture is likelly telling the other about the size of that fish he caught and let go? ;)
From a little bit of reaction mass for just kicking it into earth's gravity well and letting gravity doing the rest, all the way up to taking it down bit by bit in a space shuttle (the most expensive way there is at the moment).
Quite frankly, the rock itself is an ablative heat shield, all you need is some way to control descent velocity, much cheaper than getting stuff into orbit from the bottom of a gravity well.
Space.com says that mining specialists and space engineers, who gathered at the latest Space Resources Roundtable, think the answer is yes.
If they said no, would they be out of job?
- Hey, who has better vacation ideas than AAA?
- According to the publisher of this AAA guidebook, no one.
I would be afraid to leave lawyers behind. There is no telling what will happen to earth if the lawyer are left here to breed. Chances are there wont be a plannet to come back to.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Is there any news on building the first Space Elevator? I read a few months ago they were finalizing their decision on the site.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Once we start increasing the mass of the earth with extra terrestrial mining it wil definitely have a detrimental impact. We will have to "lighten the load", as it were. This means that YOUR FAT ASS WILL HAVE TO GO. Be proud in the fact that you weren't just voted off the island, you were voted off the planet!
Freeks like Pauly Shore and Carrot Top are prime examples why we need to bring back the draft!
Sure there will be laws saying what you can do out there. But it will take some time for governments to find the means to enforce those laws. Once earth economies start relying on goods from space it will be even harder to enforce property laws out there.
If some one had the tecnology to go to moon right now and extract resources worth billions of dollars who would stop them? What about the next guy who can do it? Who's going to say they can't because there's not enough moon for two partys?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to- oh wait. Yes it does.
Assume we remove 1/100th of 1% of this which should not matter for system stability.
This would still require us to remove 7,300,000 billion tons of material (that's 7 million billion tons).
So in short: No.
Stephen Baxter's book has a nice account of the problems involved in trying to mine an asteroid. It also has many good ideas on how to push Nasa and the lawyers out of the way.
What are we mining here? There are difficulties around the mining/processing that are above and beyond the space issue. For example, are we mining platiunm laced iron ore? Will we extract the platinum (or iron, depending on how ya' look at it) in situ, or will it be shipped to Earth? Transport becomes a distance problem that we have yet to solve. Not so much the shipping to Earth as the sudden stop when it arrives.
Let's focus on solar mining, which we can practically do from the comfort of our own home. Shipping problems are easy to resolve, and we desperately need the energy now more so than the iron.
-- Perky
The preceding comment has been documented as containing no EPHI and is certifiable as HIPPA Phase II Compliant.
I am a Star Wars geek. I mis-read "Space Mining" as "Spice Mining" and immediately thought of making the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. But before you beat me senseless for being such a nerd, let me just say that I am definitely in favor of turning lawyers into rocket fuel.
Mining (with importation to the Earth) will only be feasible if energy is cheap enough. Otherwise the cost of delta-V (the delivery cost of getting the materials from the destination to the Earth) will make the materials not cost effective. It takes energy to boost materials from the Moon, move materials to low-Earth orbit, bring them down to Earth, etc.
Platinum might be a very valuable metal (until the market is flooded by extra-planetary platinum), but I would expect that extraction costs would be extremely high in space and delivery costs would chew up any remaining profit (and not cover the amortized costs for R&D and initial launch of the space mining colony).
The real value for space mining will be in self-sustaining colonies.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
When the freighter goes up, it can carry radioactive waste and push it off so it crashes into the sun.
I love the thought of lawyers penetrating into space, exploding in a cloud of court orders and subpoenas as they're jettisoned out of the back of the shuttle.
Ahh, the pleasures of jettisoning lawyers into hard vacuum.
You know what else is fun?
Sending politicians out the airlock, and watching them bloat like hot air balloons until they explode in a cloud of lies and broken promises.
-kgj
-kgj
space mining? certainly as long as i can wear my CLING ON. i love getting frisky with my neighbor's dog.
NASA is a bloated, inept bureaucracy that needs to die. Kill them and set up something akin to the FAA to regulate takeoffs and landings.
That would just be worse. The FAA already regulates atmospheric travel in the US, so I'm sure they are more than capable of regulating rockets traveling through that space.
Setting up more agencies to 'regulate' an industry that has yet to prove commercial viability is insane. Unless there is a breakthrough of major proportions, for-profit space missions are going to be sparse at best.
Would you like to 'regulate' WiFi as well? Infant industries need space to play, not regulations to follow.
Also, there is no real problem with most of what NASA does in terms of exploration. It just has some massive bloat in a few programs (Shuttle, ISS, etc.) that could be overhauled with less expensive and more scientific solutions.
Depends upon your definition of "eventually." Eventually we may end up living in a Dyson Sphere or Ringworld. At that point, yes. A few billion years before then, I doubt it.
My daddy told me about this once... He was a smartitator.
- GW Bush
A+
How far off till they form a space mining union? Should cheap ore from space mined by robots be subject to import tariffs? We wouldn't want to start an interplanetary trade war. How do you claim ownership of moon land, martian territory or a whole asteroid?
You don't need to carry the things yourself. Just accelerate whatever you want to send in the right direction and let inertia and gravity do the job. If you aim right you may be able to send the packages into a near-Earth orbit, wherefrom you collect them using cheap vehicles and send them down in the orbital elevator.
And before you start laughing, most of the ideas in the previous paragraph are almost out of the science fiction already. Before we manage to build a Lunar base or mine an asteroid we will probably have solved the rest.
We are really frickin small.
A more important observation is that we have managed to cob up our planet without a significant exchange of matter between our planet and other celestial bodies. In total a couple tons (a very optimistic estimate) has truly left the Earth's gravitational pool (the stuff in near Earth orbit doesn't count...in the cosmic scale its mass is at Earth).
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Earth.
There is no shortage of precious minerals on Earth, especially in the oceans. Mining them is simply a matter of cost.
It does not have to cost a great amount to prohibit mining. If a mineral is worth $1.00 per pound and it cost $1.01 per pound to mine, then the cost of mining is prohibitive.
So, the question is not the feasibility of space mining, but whether it would cost more to mine, say, gold on the moon than to extract it from sea water.
Seems the information was good. It simply wasn't a link
He won't get even one penny. His claims have no basis in either fact or law.
Current law is that no-one can own a celestial body. I expect this will get overturned in a hurry if there's serious commercial reason to claim things, but as it stands, he is not allowed to claim them.
Current fact is that he has no way to get to any of the objects he claims. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, and he doesn't have possession. NASA has a better claim to 433 Eros than he does (they've got a facility on the asteroid, he has nothing).
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Just send a space ship. Blast big rocks into smaller rocks. Collect smaller rocks. A good model can be found here.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I imagine the cost of getting the materials safely to Earth, where they can compete with local sources, would do a lot to offset the savings generated by the sudden surplus of such minerals.
I further imagine that the value of these space minerals will be based on the new things they allow us to do: manufacture things in space. That is, their value will be based on the demand for space-built items (stations, mining facilities, moonbases, city-ships, &c.). So long as these space-built items remain desireable, demand will remain high, even as scarcity is reduced in space the same way it's been reduced on earth.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Only if you remember to pay for parking.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
??
Use it for manufacturing out there.
If it is gold, melt it into bricks and put it in a vault out there. Sell certificated for that gold here.
Kind of breaks the illusion that we harbor now that you can exchange your little piece of paper for actual gold tho....
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
We're whalers on the moon
We carry a harpoon
But there are no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing a whaling tune!
Just don't do it on LV-426.
Heh, can you pollute an un-inhabitable environment?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
- Turns out you can't leave Earth without them.
well, of course!if you can't sink 'em to the bottom of the ocean
try shooting 'em to the moon!
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
The Moon is OURS! We have a flag up there to prove it!
It would be too expensive until the Space Elevator is constructed. After that, all kinds of mining and other things will occur.
What's the price per tonn to send stuff to ISS (300km away)? About tens of millions of dollars at least. Mars is much, much further away...
Asteroid mining isn't much better. Sure they come very close to earth, but:
- they move very fast and are small. Thus landing of huge mining equipment to a small asteroid will be very difficult.
- they stay near in proximity for only a short time. What's the point of sending multibillion mining machine to an asteroid which will be 100 million kilometers away after a year or two?
In addition you have to get that stuff back somehow. This basically means that either you are sending huge amounts of ore which contains only small amounts of rare metals or you transfer huge ore refirement factory to the asteroid/Mars. Neither option is very effective.
Space mining will be feasible only when we can build effictive self-sufficent machines. A small machine would use local rocks and solar power to build a mining and refirement factory without additional resources. This technology will be propably at least 100-200 years away.
Hey! Leave my sex life out of this!
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
A Base? In that case, how are you, gentlemen?
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
You are obviously so fucking stupid that you can't even control your fingers.
First off... Profit in space. No. What they are going to do is sink tons of fucking cash into it and then watch it fucking fail. Just like everything else that investors do. This is not going to make a penny.
WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU KIDDING?
Give money away afterwards? No. Give the money away to worthy causes first. I can guarantee space exploration/building/whatever isn't as important as what is going on right here right now.
You are such a fucking jerk off I can't stand it.
There have been variations of this "floating" around for a long time now.
The most chersihed is to build a space station at either the L4 or L5 Lagrange Points - equidistant from both moon and Earth (and a 'gravitational trap' - sort of) - and mine the moon - from which it would be relatively easier to lift off with materials to help make the station...A long way to go for some mafic minerals...
Maybe a pit stop on a way out to further parts.
An unlikely place to actually think of a serious mining operation. Lagrange Points
Subduction leads to orogeny
This guy is sounding more and more like a drug addict to me.
Take it easy? I'll take it anyway I can get it . . .
There is no room for asking whether space mining is feasible or not; there simply is no other option for building large structures in space and on other planets. What we need to be looking at is what methods of space mining are feasible, as well as refining and processing options.
...
The materials (iron, rare earths, iridium, nickel) that you could bring back simply do not command prices high enough to make it worthwhile - they're in the few dollars to few hundred dollars/kg range.
This might change IF someone invented fusion that worked, and required He3. Then it might be worth it. Don't call me until that happens... and don't hold your breath, either.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
I can't strongly enough say how much of a bad idea this is.
Bringing more stuff to earth is not the answer! Use less, re-use more!
Pretty Pictures!
Consume consume consume!
You can't send people to the moon because of those damn Van Allen Radiation Belts!
YHBT. YHL. FoaD.
Of all places for this concept to escape someone, I would never figure it to be /.
Hey genius, ever hear of multi-tasking? So since we haven't cured human nature, the astronauts should stay home and help out with that? What would they do? Meanwhile we could use the additional resources, give people more jobs, and benefit society more by moving forward instead of sitting at home with our tv trays wishing everyone "could just get along". Trust me, I know what you're saying, I have said it myself ( here ), but that doesn't mean we halt progress until idiots get smart.
ymmv
In the great tradition of Western civilization - lets ship felons out!
Surely a lot of enterpreneual people would gladly exchange 10 years in jail for 3 years of back breaking work mining Ceres or whatever for the chance of complete reabilitation and possible fortune.
It is cheaper - less safety precautions needed. So NASA should just provide minimum transports and expertise and private prison management companies will do the rest.
Along the same lines, let those who want to leave Earth. Freaks, sects, religious minorities, music downloaders.
Just like America, Australia, etc. space will be initially populated by the official scam of the Earth.
To be clearer about this... let's change the term from racist to supremacist as that is the real problem. Any time that someone gets the idea that they or their cohort group are superior to someone else or some other group, problems start. This goes straight back to the selfishness problem. I will say this for the benefit of all mankind. NO ONE IS SUPERIOR TO ANYONE ELSE. I don't care if you are white, black, hispanic, jewish, what have you... there is no one who is superior to anyone. Any person or group thinking that they are superior is damaged and needs to be destroyed. So, rather than labelling them with some arbitrary type that *I* assign to them, instead they are eliminated based on their own label that they applied to themselves.
because I know you all care what I think..
The assumption that there are limited resources is a lie. Because we now understand that the Earth is not flat and it orbits a star, like so many other planets, comets, asteroids, etc.
I have always held the belief that there are no excuses. If people are starving we are not doing the work necessary to take care of them. Its not their fault they are starving.
So if we want to get off our lazy asses and do something about the lack of wealth in the world we can. By building automated robotic systems, factories, etc. and using any materials necessary to carry out whatever it takes to make us happy.
Happiness is the goal here, not money.
The needs of the society outweigh the wants of the individual. But the needs of the individual outweigh the wants of the society. Individuals need the freedom to explore reality and life to its fullest extent, as long as they don't take away this freedom from anyone else.
If a person needs food to survive, society must provide it. If society needs wealth to be happy, us little individuals will have to do without until we build the automation and collect the resources to make it happen. Doing without is okay as long as no one is dying. But there's absolutely no reason to do without information and education, because this is essentially free.
Use common sense.
Both capitalism and communism don't seem to care if the individual is dying, so I say society needs to be restructured and reformed until at least that bug is squashed..
Society is one big computer program, like the kernel, but there are so few programmers (and most of them are in such disagreement) that we can't even make it run without crashing.
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Moon and Mars. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Earth?
That's funny, because the Martian version of slashdot has a story today that starts out:
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Earth. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Mars?
The whole space mining thing strikes me as a fairly feeble excuse for promoting space exploration. Is there any resource that we need so desperately that couldn't be found here on Earth for a fraction of the cost?
There may be lots of good reasons for exploring space, even with humans, but I don't know that this is one of them.
Whatever you find on Mars better be pretty freaking valuable, as the cost to get it back to Earth is probably like $1,000,000 per ounce.
G.
I took a class called "Resources From Space" at University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1998. It was taught by, among others, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, who was the only scientist and last man on the moon (Apollo 17 - he was a geologist). He's now a fusion researcher and teaches this class along with other professors from geology, economics, physics, and nuclear engineers from the fusion technology institute at UW.
The final impression left with me from that class was that, back in 1998, if we were to start up an initiative to mine the moon we would have to raise $215 billion and not see any return until the year 2015 (our focus was on He3, but I think this'll apply to most any moon mining operation). That's essentially a 20 year investment with huge risk, so finding either public or private funding to help launch the operation was the biggest obstacle. Technology was also obviouisly an issue, but the mantra "You can always count on technology to catch up to you" was definitely enforced since most of the profs were fusion researchers.
Also, back then there was little competition in the public eye. My professors were aware that China was ahead of us in the push since they had government funding, but the competition existed only within a few small, scientific circles. No public awareness at all. We were looking at long-term energy-crisis solution, and this was a feasible answer. Our hopes may have been lofty, yet the projections realistic, at the time given the current sentiment. Currently there may be more eagerness by potential investors to get involved, but I'm unaware of a project of these proportions of both scale and risk that's been executed in the present day.
BTW, the web site for the class (last offered fall -2001) is a very thorough and exciting read (esp. the Apollo 17 space mission from the second day). It's also a great resource for questions regarding everything involved in mining the moon.
Depends upon what your definition of "is", is.
I always envisioned a really cheap way of mining asteroids... Calculate the minimum energy required to alter their course and divert them to earth using thrusters. Just let them crash down in the desert and then go mine the minerals. It may take years for a minimal energy diversion to get here, so there would be these guys who travel to different asteroids and install thrusters for a living to prime the pipeline. Every so often you'd have a minor miscalculation and a nice sim-city style disaster...
It's a perfect time to try out a completely humanless mining facility, without any unions getting upset about it!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I have a moon base on the far side of the moon that contains a vast supply of real 24k gold tacks, and they are for sale. It is a safe investment - gold has always been the safest investment.
Unfortunately, you can only get the certificate, as the gold stays on the moon. You cannot exchange the certificate for gold. But the certificate rightly says you own as many tacks as you buy. Pure and simple capitalism.
I sell these prime gold tacks for just $1,000 each. That's well below market value. Get yours today, invest in your comfortable retirement!
(Just to be uber-clear: this is a meta-post, I'm trying to make a point here...)
...But what do we do once the Gundams start disrupting the supply lines?
I, for one, predict that all these new minerals will be so heavy that the earth will no longer be stable to hold us and we... err... all fall down. Yep.
Wouldn't this affect the overall weight of the planets and possibly eventually throw off their orbits?
It is true that many of today's technologies came out of the space program. However the industry I believe needs to move away from government funds and be taken up by private interests. Now it is time for the next step which is for the commercialization of space flight. There is a ton of money to be made by extraterrestrial mining. The corporate execs just have to look past the initial cash layout to get to it. I firmly believe that once the process begins, it will be like a snowball effect, comparatively similar to the PC revolution. Someone just needs the balls to take the first step. With technologies that are currently being developed by such people as Burt Rutan and others like him, this can be a reality sooner then later. Also keep in mind that once the corporate interests really grasp the money to be made that they will develop ways of making it even cheaper to increase their profit margins.
No problem. If we need any more, we could just steal it from Druidia
As the article says about lawyers, it 'turns out you can't leave Earth without them.'
In space, no one can hear a lawyer scream...
Seriously, though, when we do get our collective asses off this planet, we will go through a period of wild west in space. Unless space is being policed by a government body (highly improbable for a LONG LONG time), property rights will be unenforcable. Physical access to celestial bodies will be all that is required to make claims. And claims will be impossible to enforce if that physical presence changes.
Lawyers? They only make a difference if there are LAWS backed by POLICE. Take those two things away and a lawyer becomes a big mouth without teeth...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
About a year ago, I read an article (somewhere) that broke down the projected revenue vs. cost of mining an avarage asteroid once the technology is available. The bottom line was that the raw iron alone would be worth more than the GDP of all the industrialized nations on earth. Anyone willing to front me the startup cash??
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
The resources of the moon could easily fund the further colonization of the solar system. A pound of metal already in orbit around the earth is a lot more valueable than a pound of metal we had to rocket up there.
I don't see any value in bringing anything back down to the earth, just build space habitats and space craft on the moon and colonize the entire solar system with them. The problem isn't that we have too few resources on the earth, the problem is that we have way too many people.
Ship about 3 billion people off to the moon and the earth wouldn't be bad at all.
I don't know if this guy is ligit, but.... Check this site out. Two former US Presidents own lunar land sold by him. http://www.planetaryinvestments.com/ Oh and sry if someone already brought this up
- CurrentCost = CheapThirdWorldLabor + SlowCheapTransportation + CostOfThirdWorldInfrastructure + CostOfThirdWorldInsurance
- SpaceMiningCost = CostOfSpaceTransport + CostOfTerrestrialSpaceComplex + CostOfExpensiveLabor + CostOfAstronautTraining + CostOfExtraterrestrialInfrastructure + CostOfExtraterrestrialInsurance
Now, bear with me, this is a tough question: Which is the more expensive process?Folks, this is pure unadulterated bullshit decorated with fancy trappings. If the Space Resources Roundtable really believes it is commercially viable to bring in mineral ore from the moon, the asteroids, or Mars, then they have pretty much shown us all their cards. Worse if they propose to build the refining infrastructure at an extraterrestrial location (add this comparison to the above two statements). Only a fool could possibly be concerned about their pompous opinions.
I love the wooshing sound they don't make as they noiselessly float out of the airlock into space.
That's a damn good idea.
I could frankly give a spacefaring fuck about the moon. Moving polluting industry off of earth and onto it sounds like a terrific use for space.
Assuming most of us are still living here on earth, though, that would mean we'd have to have -very- cheap access to space. A big hunk of raw minerals you can just shove down the gravity well and your biggest concern is the damage caused by the impact. Manufactured goods would need a somewhat more reliable landing.
Once again, the Space Elevator seems like the only way to achieve this goal. And once again, life begins to immitate my SMAC games.
The enemies of Democracy are
Of course there is air in space.
There's an air in space museum.
Actually we're in JUST the right RANGE from the sun, which is far more tolerant than you'd think. Besides, if we start mining in space we would also have the capability to change the Earth's orbit through a creative use of asteroids and slingshot maneuvers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1154784.stm
Honestly though, with NASA's penchant for missing it's targets, I would hate to think what they'd do with 100km asteroid.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
Royce McCutcheon: You'll be on a rocket-ride to the moon! And while you're there, would you pick up some of that nice, green moon money for me -- Royce McCutcheon!
Homer: No deal, McCutcheon, that moon money is mine!
RED FACTION!!!!
The reason these are "precious minerals" is because they are rare. Devaluation anyone?
The first step is getting to Keplerian low-Earth orbit cheaply, otherwise this is all Moonshine.
NASA originally claimed that the Shuttle would do this for us. Unfortunately, it turned out that shuttle launch costs ($/pound of payload) are so high that if there were unlimited free gold in low-Earth orbit, it wouldn't pay to go get it in the shuttle.
Don't pray for NASA to lead this effort. If they tried, they could bankrupt the World.
GNU Info is documentation optimized for machine readability
The only reason one would consider it is the cost of extracting on earth, ie scarcity controls price. But if there is an abundant source like asteroids, there is no scarcity and there is no value.
uh.. no. Want to see something insightful, then you should look around a little bit and read about the dozens of *non-space related things* NASA does.
NASA is not 100% space science.
Wait a minute, if a mining operation was to exist on the moon, wouldn't that imply that a delivery system would be in place for the mined materials? Since a conveyor belt system is out of the question, one could assume that transport ships would be used. Neglecting the problem that more energy is required to get from the Earth to the moon than vice-versa, why can't these interplanetary dump-trucks simply return with the supplies needed to sustain the operation?
Nice troll, I'll bite.
We are all 100% guaranteed to die if we don't get off this planet, it's only a matter of time. And since we don't know when, delaying the research to get our asses off this planet could be the end of us all.
BTW, if you want to talk about right here right now, just take a look at how many billions are spent destroying iraq, which posed 0 threat to the US. Even 1/10 of that money would be a huge huge benefit to any of your 'worthy causes'.
I am sorry I am still not sure here...
I don't know about NO ONE being Superior to anyone, my boss is superior in the organization, my son is (he's 1 yo) is much shorter than I am so I am Superior in height. So do we need to make everyone the same height and work status?
Assuming you mean "who decides that someone is doesn't apply the same value for human rights for others as they do for themselves". Who would decide what they think or is this on the "honor" system "If you think you are superior, please report to the execution chamber for termination"
Or would you just kill all the "arrogant people", well believe it or not those people may not agree with your classification, and they will fight back (go figure).
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
You may not be able to leave earth without lawyers but nothing is said about bring them back.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Agreed, by the time everything is setup, you really have to break it all down to a per-unit dollar amount, at which point we'd be paying way too much to justify all the work to get there. And besides, that's what third world indigents are for, mining us up some stuff!
And then there was E
It is definitely feasable. In fact, I've begun work to startup a company solely for surveying and mining other planetary bodies. I'm thinking of naming the company Weyland Yutani and so far my engineers have put together a preliminary ship design we call 'Nostromo'
I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal.
We are still trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet. Some day it may be feasible to mine the moon, asteroids, or Mars but is it even possible at this point? The last time I heard the are having trouble just getting a few pounds of supplies to the space station. How could they possibly get tons of metal and rock back to Earth? I guess that's going the other way and they can just build a some sort of big barge type thing and just crash it in Earth and hope it lands in Nevada and not the bottom of the Pacific.
As usual geeks are getting ahead of themselves. Space travel is not routine and until it becomes routine and therefore way cheaper there is no point in discussing how to make money from outer space. No point at all, I declare this convseration over. Good day sir.
LoRider
Rather than try to extract the minerals from an asteroid in space why not jsut rbing one back to earth and dump it somewhere where it won't bother anyone, like Utah
Of course it's possible read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.. of course eventually a mechanic and a self-aware computer will overthrow the gov't, but that isn't that big of a deal.
As the subject says, who will own all of these minerals? Will it be a first-come, first-serve basis? Will there be any types of restrictions placed on how much mining can be performed? <ultra-paranoid>How will this affect gravitational pulls?</ultra-paranoid>
Kind of interesting. I'd say that generally, the Slashdot crowd leans to the left. One thing that most people on the left favor is conservation of resources. And yet most of the Slashdot crowd seems to be strongly in favor of gaining resources from space. Yes, I'm overgeneralizing and using poor logic. Sue me. :)
Even if there were piles of golden bars on the Moon lying around, it would still cost more to get them to Earth than to buy them on Earth in the first place. In other words---"This Moon isn't worth the gold it's made of!"---as one could paraphrase.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
You know of course that aids is essentially a voluntary disease. if for just 2 or 3 generations people would stop having indescriminent sex and stick with one partner for life then aids would go away completely. Yes I know that some people get aids through other means, but those other means are rare and very controllable. Oh and for teh record I had a dear uncle who died of AIDS.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Then the world would be safe!
Yes but instead of shipping the stuff with expensive vehicles, why not just shoot it toward earth to some orbiting 'catcher' that then decends it to earth?
Causing Chaos Everywhere,
Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
Yes, why do we bother to get out of bed in the morning? Now take your answer and multiply it by all the people that have ever lived.
Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?
Seastead this.
Surely nobody uses enough He3 currently to pay for this project. Or [gasp], did it assume a vast He3-consuming fusion energy industry would exist by 2015 that would snap up limitless amounts of expensive He3 from space?
That is patently ridiculous.
What Nasa does today fuels the industries of tomorrow.
Talking about fuel: how are we going to get to mars or even the moon, after we've burned up all fossil fuel?
If the Space Elevator works we might be able to cut that cost by a huge margin. So all you nano-tech researchers quit reading /. and get back to work on long nanofibers!
I want to be the first person to get away with murder in space!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just throw a mess of drones out to a few asteroids and have the drones nudge the asteroids to our orbit. With swarming AI, you could have a few drones work in concert to speed up the process and have some on our end to slow them down and position them for mining.
"Would it be cheaper to send people up to the asteroid to mine or, send automated equipment to return the asteroid to earth orbit (or even a controlled re-entry)?"
It would almost certainly be cheaper. Once you are out in space things become expensive based on how much fuel and how much change in velocity is required to get there and back. Mars is *expensive* from that point of view. And given that it seems to be mostly low grade iron ore - why bother? With asteriods, comets and near earth objects the fuel costs are low and the ore quality is much much higher. You can pick and choose what you want. High quality metallic ores? No problem. Need volatiles for fuel and oxygen for your team? No problem. Pick an object and go get it. For an object that is basically a frozen ball of hydrocarbons all you need to do is haul a rocket engine out there and melt yourself enough fuel to push it where you want it.
I just don't see the point of mining heavy bodies unless it is for a colony that is *on* that body.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
"...manufacture things in space..."
but then there's the problem with illegal aliens...
Obviously you haven't seen the Matrix......sheesh
I think the most important parts of his ideas were getting space elevators (one on Earth and one on Mars, if we're going to mine anything on Mars) and getting advanced automated robotic factories that could be launched at asteroids, build engines into the asteroids after landing using the asteroid's resources, and sail the asteroids back to Earth orbit where we can finish exploiting them.
As a person who knows a little something about mining, we have a hard enough time making economically viable mines on THIS plannet.
... Sigh retards
I mean there a thousand strong kimberlite pipes up north with millions of dollars worth of diamonds that are just not economical to mine.
What makes anyone think that adding the logistics of going to space (not to meantion how do you get a 400tonne caterpillar shovel into orbit) but fuel/engineering costs go through the roof.
Theres a lot more to mining than just getting to the mine site.
Wake up space folks... it took nasa billions to make a pen and tang. Getting one of those monumental sized mining machines (you will need a good dozen at a mimimum) into space would take a helluv a lot more engineering than we have now...
Remember that ONE caterpillar shovel is waaaaaaay bigger than the whole ISS.
It would make much more sense to move the humans where the resources are; over time, the greater population should be spread across the solar system and not on earth.
Consider, for instance, ECAs (Earth Crossing Asteroids); if these rocks got turned into homes then, over time, there would be a motivation by the residents of that rock to not collide with earth. This was you don't have to go through deflection efforts.
So how many gigatonnes of refined metals and the like will be be adding to the earth's mass?
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
The only problem with terraforming both mars, and venus too, is water. Both have atmosphere composed mostly of CO2, so if we could crash a couple of omets into the planets we could just dump some seeds. The right plants could thrive and produce all the oxygen we could need. Something that could grow in iron rich soil for mars, and for venus, a lichen or something that could handle the sulfuric acid and everything else.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
David E. Kelley's next show... Martial Law, about the first lawyer on Mars, who happens to be an attractive woman with a penchant for wearing revealing space suits, and her wisecracking paralegal.
Some very interesting stuff on the UN Office for Outer space affairs' website:
:p
here
Interesting blurbs:
1 Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means
The thinking being, "it's everybody's good, so the lunar and martian surface -and all other planets for that matter- can't be anybody's property".
I think they also ban the commercial appropriation (selling / buying) of land on outer space.
The UN body also states:
2 "the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind"
Does that mean that if you start mining the moon, you have to redistribute your profit to all the other countries?
but also states:
3 "outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States"
so you *do* have a right to mine the moon...
and (interesting stuff):
4 "States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies."
Which means you're not supposed to pollute the planet you're mining (does that mean bringing back toxic waste on earth, or putting it in orbit?)
Hmm... the countries that signed these treaties are legally bound by them, so things could get messy
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
It would only seem reasonable to mine extraterrestrial sources when we "need" them. In other words, if we have a shortage of iron on our planet then it would make sense to go and mine the closest extraterrestrial sources. Even in that situation, only if our recovery techniques on terrestrial iron wouldn't yield enough supply for the demand. The only other reason to mine an extraterrestrial sources would be to supply/resupply a space exploration journey. In that vein, it would be cheaper to supply a mission that was launched from the moon with material mined from the moon, than it would be to supply from Earth.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
As is pointed out right above this post (sorting by moderation), 1/100% of the mass of the Moon is >7 million billion tons, and the Earth is significantly heftier than the moon. We might cause deviations on the order of meters...utterly totally insignificant in this context.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The value-per-pound of minerals (even gold) exceeds the cost-of-launch-transport-and-reentry-per-pound.
Or in formulaic terms (V/W) > (CLTR/W)
(where W is weight)
Thus we have the inherent problem of space mining.
Basically the problem is that 'gold' is either too heavy, or not valuable enough -- depending on how you look at it.
However... if we were talking about 'spice' from Arrakis, or 'gold pressed latinum'... or 'Droids' even... then the whole space trading would totally make sense.
(of course)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
good points. however the law making it impossable to own celestial bodies pertains to a UN treaty and only applies to nations.
basicly, that treaty can remain in effect and we will just leave space to the comercial ventures, just like we did back in the days of european imperialism.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Screw that. Bring us to it. Build small colonies there. Build cities and nations. If you build it, they will come. We need humanity to move beyond this mudball. That's the first priority. It's our only hope for survival, in the long run.
Seems to me that energy is the problem here, all that energy moving stuff around would require a dirt cheap and plentiful supply of energy. The only candidate right now is fusion, so this is all just stupid banter until fusion becomes an everyday pracical reality.
If we suddenly truck in tons of precious metals from space, and whet our appetite for them, the cease becomming precious. Whoever mines space will have a momentary blip of profit before the costs of spacetravel exceed the newly lowered price of the materials.
The reason we don't use the gold standard anymore is in part to prevent booms and busts in our currency caused by people flooding the market with new sources of gold. (The american dollar took a bath after the California and the Yukon gold rushes.)
So just forget about any long-term sustainable industries built on dragging what are presently exotic materials to Earth from space.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Imagine this system...
Huge fuel-tankers are stationed near the belt. Many smaller drill ships, operated by people on Earth, wander around the belt finding smaller asteroids containing the appropriate minerals. When they find these asteroids, they drill anchor holes into them and slap a radio tag on them. Transport ships use these radio tags to find asteroids to bring back. They use the anchor holes to grip the asteroid, then pull it back toward Earth, stopping them just inside the gravitational pull of Earth so that they remain in orbit.
Then we send manned missions to carve up these asteroids and bring them back in capsules that are capable of re-entry.
The real question here should be not just the practicalities involved. I would suggest that if space is developed, another world war is much less likely than if space is not developed.
Look at Europe. The rise of the Nazi's is intimately tied with the closing of America as s destination for German migration.
In the 1960s, it was a young, brash agency with a mandate. Now it's just another government bureaucracy.
The misleading word there is 'precariously'. The position of the Earth's orbit around the Sun is essentially a function of the Sun's mass and the velocity of the Earth as it orbits the Sun. The Earth's mass is immaterial to the orbit. So provided the Sun does not suddenly change its mass, or the Earth undergoes some supernatural acceleration, we're safe.
As for the Earth-Moon system, it isn't static as you might think. The Moon's orbit is gradually enlarging as it strips rotational energy from the Earth. Effect on the Earth? Longer days, nothing else. At the same time, each body continues to accumulate hundreds of tonnes of asteroidal and cometary material as smaller bodies smack into their surface.
Best wishes,
Mike.
As you say, the cost of extracting the item on earth would need to be greater than the cost of extracting from space. However, the "value" of the mineral extracted (from earth or space) shouldn't ever be less than a certain percentage above the cost of extracting that mineral, and definitely not lower than that cost. An abundance of some object doesn't ever reduce the "value" of said object to zero. Especially, when that object is a "raw material" for other objects (which means it will be in demand) as is the case with most minerals. The abundance of a desired object will keep the cost of the object "down", but will never cause the object's value to reach zero. People pay for dirt, for air, and for other "abundant" objects when they have a demand for said object.
This is a gross simplification of certain aspects of economic theory. However, it is useful for conceptualizing "value" as related to "cost" for the purposes of this post.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
"Imagine the cost of getting the materials safely to Earth..."
Why spend that money, when you could simply cause the first shipment to land in North Korea? (or in Washington, depending on whose space-program is doing the mining...)
Perhaps I will apply to your new company. Your business plans sound interesting. Would you be willing to answer a few questions, before I submit my resume?
First, what are you medical benefits like? Will there be a ship's doctor on every mission? I think that workplace safety is important, and that having qualified medical personnel on board will go a long way towards preventing severe injury and loss of life.
Also, would I be able to review any "hidden" company policies before I signed a contract? I saw a documentary on the SciFi channel the other day about a space crew that got killed by deadly aliens of death, because the company they worked for had some sort of bullshit policy about "take onboard any deadly alien of death you stumble across", or something. It was pretty lame, and I'd prefer not to work for a company with a policy like that.
Finally, if I were hired as a space mechanic, would I get the same shares as the flight officers, or are you planning on a multi-tiered payment scheme?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You're wasting your breath. People view it as some kind of cosmic destiny issue, not as a business proposition nor even something that needs to obey the laws of thermodynamics.
When a combo research/engineering agency gets so bad, it has no hope. If mozilla was the right direction for Netscape, killing NASA is the right direction for the US taxpayer.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Economic and How-To theories aside, classical law of physics, called the "conservation of matter" dictate that matter cannot be created nor destroyed, but is always a constant.
How would bringing thousands (millions?) of tons of matter over the course of several hundred/thousand years affect the the earth? The mass of the earth is approximately 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6E+24) kilograms. How much mass would we have to import to see a variation in the rotation of the planet? Is it even possible? Would we have to strategically place mining depots around the center of the Earth? If we were to add say, 1-2% to the overall mass of the planet, how would that affect seasons, rotation, and our environment?
This, not the financial impact is what I am most curious about.
the effects like ocean level changes will remain untouched.
Err, I meant "will decrease". Lower moon gravity, lesser influence on Earth.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Now is as good a time as any for my Grand Unified Theory of Star Wars Physics.
It all boils down to this: The "Galaxy Far, Far Away" is small and dense."
THANK YOU !
I can now enjoy star wars a little bit more than heretofore.
"I admit, I'm being nitpicky, but I still think naming a Galactic arm "East" inaccurate"
I can only guess how you feel about naming point particles (quarks) charmed, top, bottom, truth, beauty, and I forget the other one.
Mining the moon would have to be almost entirely mechanised as humans can barely survive in space for prolonged periods of time (stating the obvious here). The permanent base would have to be at least 15m underground to protect the humans from GCRs. Bearing in mind no humans have actually travelled outside the VABs since Apollo and that was practically suicidal anyway -> in the event of a strong solar flare the astronauts would have been rendered seriously ill. The amount of trips through the VABs needed to transport the equipment and the product would need highly advanced craft with extreme protection (no lead is not practial here). Not to mention the problems with electronics, hubble spews junk data after a solar flares, and the laptops on mir used to crash on average 3 times a day due to the radiation effects (mir was within VABs).
The FAA already is involved in space launch, at least, with regards to any commercial launch in the US.
The FAA has the authority to remove a launch license if they feel they there's danger in launching. However, they work closely with the Ranges, who have the safety expertise in determining that. And Range Safety also has the authority to stop a launch from happening (or even destroying the vehicle if necessary) For a commercial manned mission, FAA would likely defer to NASA, or at least NASA's expertise with regard to the safety of personnel.
Since those efforts of private groups to launch a man into a suborbital launch will probably not launch at either of the military Ranges (Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg) (who can blame them) the only government agency that applies is the FAA as far as I know.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
As the article says about lawyers, it 'turns out you can't leave Earth without them.'
This would be worth persuing if we can simply send ALL the lawyers to the moon...
This is not just silly or amusing. It's about 4 orders of magnitude more economically stupid than reviving nuclear energy. Seriously, just because something is possible doesn't mean it's financially advantageous.
US Steel is not just being put out of business by cheaper foreign mills. It's also squeezed for market share by smaller, energy efficient recyclers.
It's cheaper to recycle old steel than extract more - even when only transporting it on earth.
What's more, advanced composite materials might make steel a thing of the past in many industries. Cars currently use about 10% of the steel market (and a similar chunk of aluminium): as new hybrid models and fuel-efficient cars are made of more carbon-composites and plastics, the steel industry will be squeezed further.
So even if you ignore "foreign" (think space) sources, it's cheaper to
What's more, as new materials become cheaper to produce, they will also fall in price, starting to compete for steel's market share in other applications.
The economics of energy are almost as straight-forward, with industrial energy intensiveness dropping 2% a year for years now (and with ROI of 40% on energy retrofits). The debacle of the steel and aluminium industries is only going to accelerate this trend.
With those trends, no company in their right mind would invest 10's of billions to develop this type of technology - even if it was economically feasible by today's market prices, these will fall.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
thing is, this is digging into the random, not thinking about what they might do to the planet they're gonna strip-mine like the earth, you dont know if there are any extra terrestrial organisms that ough have been able to survive space and get on say, the moon, or you dont know if ther are any poisonous elements on the moon yet, and with marios, there could be bacteria and disease there that could easily start the next plague.
insteado f making a big jump into this and saying "hey, let's go strip the moon and mars of resources and open them up to commercial enterprise!" allow scientific research to be done well beforehand.
We need a couple technologies IMHO. Right around the corner we have hyperjet engine technology. With this we might be able to cut the lift wieght of a rocket literally in 1/2. This will greatly increase payload efficiency which means transporting mining equipment into space will be practical... depending on the price of course.
Next is the issue of energy. Space is just FULL of real cheap energy... which means that practically any old chunk of rock can be considered an ore.
Now... I think what is most likely is that space will be used first to collect energy. I would expect this to be underway before 2020 and it will coincide with a major energy crisis that should be well underway within a few years.
In the longer term, I expect that people will build large cylinderical habitats and live in them. In fact, this might start by 2020 as well. One way to do it is to use a mass driver to fire moon rocks to a catcher that flips them into a solar furnace. Another way is to pop over to the asteroid belt.
The habitat itself can have a metal shell - possible several feet thick with slag then rock then soil on the inside. O2 comes from the rock itself and so does the H2 in order to produce water.
After the first one is built... then we really do have a space based technology and people will really migrate to space on a more or less permanent basis. Once people can live in sapce and produce their own food and energy then earth will become the old country.
Eventually I expect there will be an exodus into space. Once the population in space reaches a threashold level and the technology is proven, then I figure a war will break out, just as there was a war between the USA and Britain. The Space inhabitants will probably become resentful of trying to support the burgeoning masses on mined out earth. Given they have a natural advantage of being able to basically drops rocks down a gravity well...
well the war will be short and one sided and planet earth will lose. At this point man will basically probably stay in space and look at the earth as we look at the moon today.
So much for daydreaming eh?
Like a heat shield and a parachute?
how about we find a cure to cancer and AIDS first, mkay?
Space mining. Seems this topic has been around for a long time, perhaps last seen in something like Popular Science, etc. in the 50's or 60's.
Only problem is the cost, and with such overpopulation on the Earth, with most not paying taxes to amount to anything, then there is no money for such pipe-dreams. The world of the future as shown in the 1939 World's Fair really didn't come true for most of the Earth's inhabitants, due to vast unemployment, disease, hunger, wars, (Four Horsemen?...). This Space mining idea is a little like China and their space program, done at the expense of the citizens of China, who make 22 cents an hour (18 hour day) making stuff for Walmart. Also, where is their budget and program for Education. Anyone? No, they don't have much of one, but can spend money on Space, to look good to the World. BS, I say. Our Space Mining idea is just that, and don't let me disrupt anyone's dream of a world where projects like this can be funded and become a reality. After all, it is only a dream, and perhaps will come true in (say 200-300 years?) Makes me wonder what else has to come true to make that happen. A big, really big War, or perhaps some sort of horrible disease that "eliminates" a good portion of the population. Why would this be good? Is there any proof that the people that survive would be only the highly productive ones, that pay lots of taxes, buy stock, etc. to support space ventures either by govenments or private companies? No idea, but it is obvious that the burden on the productive and paying population placed by the hungry and poor masses has us spending money on them, rather than on space adventures. Lots of questions here, so kindly place your views and solutions here if you will.
I don't expect any off-Earth facility to be totally independent of the Earth for the next half century after it's first established. So expect our miners to want some R & R. Or do you expect our space miners to make out with the local population?
Sometime I think Bob Zubrin's Mars activism is misplaced. Our only hope for a self-sustaining space future is in the commercialization of space beyond the comsat and space tourist stage. And the moon is the better, if not the best, place to start a base for off-Earth mining, either in itself or as the transit point for mining the minor planets. A grandiose mission to Mars will serve nothing but the egoes of a few intrepid space cowboys.
(For a sci-fi novel on asteroid mining, I recommend Stephen Baxter's Manifold Time. He actually prefers a direct asteroid to Earth orbit approach: mine the asteroid and dump the raw materials, encased in gigantic plastic bags, onto Earth orbit.)
it's truly amazing how many people here seem to believe that it takes as much energy and effort to fall down as it does to climb up. The whole reason space minimg can ever make sense is that the delivery cost to earth FROM space can be near zero. The cost to get there is astronomical (how appropriate), but the return can be near free. To make a profit, you will have to ship back a lot, and make most of what you need. At least half of the posts i've seen here assume that you can only bring stuff back on a rocket that brings it up in the first place.
Rockets will always be very expensive. There won't be profits from space 'till there is an infrastructure that will support some people living there permanently.
Some posters seem to think that machines will make everything there for us. That pipe dream has been making the rounds for at least 40 years. There is still no machine that can make anything even mildly complex without frequent human intervention. Sorry, no unmanned pie in the sky. Our machines just aren't very smart.
So, someday, we have to go.
Accept it. Build the infrastructure, one step at a time. The moon really is the next step we need. We can do it, or we can watch western civilization sink while the new masters of the earth lord it over us. Your choice, rise or fall, that's all there really is.
It really depends on what you mean by "feasible" and by when you would want to mine.
- To consider the "what" as meaning:
- returning a significant quantity/quality of payload to earth
- manned mining with acceptable level of risk to miners
- acceptable "cost of doing business" for extraction
Then the answer is no, it isn't feasible. We will not be able to mine and return ore or processed material to earth from our own moon, much less from anything further out in space, at a scale considerable enough to be called "mining".- To consider the "when":
- you mean 11/19/2003
- you mean 11/19/2005
- you mean 11/19/2010
My belief would be, no.We possess the capabilities to send a manned vehicle to the moon and return. We have demonstrated that with Apollo. We possess the ability to send items to and return items from orbit. We have demonstrated that with our satellite launch and recovery capabilities involving the Space Shuttle program (whether you like the shuttle or not, it is the only vehicle currently that carries that capability). We even possess the capability of sending non-manned robotic craft to land on other planets/satellite-bodies. We demonstrated that capability with Viking, Pathfinder, and Surveyor. So, in review of this information, we know we can send both man and machine to land on the moon and return home to earth. We can send machine to land on Mars but not return. We can send machine to the moon and not return. It is true that none of the unmanned missions I listed were intended to return to the earth.
To be truly "feasible" in the sense that matches my above definition, we need to be able to demonstrate a couple more capabilities.
- We need to:
- Demonstrate the ability to have an unmanned vehicle land on another planet/body and then return to earth on its own power. To my knowledge, that project hasn't been completed.
- Mitigate the effects of long term exposure to microgravity or reduced gravity on the human body (for manned mining missions). Until we invent artificial gravity or simulate earth gravity successfully, we will have a difficult time establishing bases or completing long distance journeys (mars and back).
- Demonstrate that we can successfullly mine and process ore remote from our facilities here on earth.
- Possibly the most important, is to demonstrate that there is a significant will or desire to mine extra-terrestrial bodies.
So, to make mining feasible, we would need a solid commitment to such a goal from commercial and governmental entities. We would also need to establish projects to develop and demonstrate the capabilites we are currently missing. In the end, it is attainable, just not right now.To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
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Ever heard of a little place called America? Once upon a time it was a dangerous and comparitively sparcly populated place. Whole settlements were wiped out and caualty rates in the North East remaind about 75% for hundreds of years. Those that survived did well. There were rousources worth going for and eventually it became a place people from all around the world would like to be.
One Red Dwarf predicted furtue is that terraforming makes paradises of other planets and Earth is abandoned by all but a few million people who are too stupid or stuborn to go.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
China can leave Earth without lawyers.
Just watch them go, dig, go.
I remember reading this a long time ago: If there were solid gold ingots, .999 pure already fabricated and neatly stacked on the surface of the moon, it wouldn't pay to go up there and bring them back.
And people think outerspace mining makes sense?
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Where life is possible it will flourish.
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True independence from earth, I believe, is embodied in a self sustaining operation that can last for years (like on a mission to mars). But it requires a fusion of disiplines, some of which science science has less of a grasp on. It seems to me that having a functioning biosphere is in many ways as important as, say, mining oxygen from the moon or fuels needed to get home, and in some ways more difficult to perfect.
What I don't see considered, is the idea that bringing loads of extra mass back to our planet could upset our solar orbit.
I know that small amounts of rock hit us all the time, but consider if we continually bring more and more back to Earth in the future. Could we inadvertently tip ourselves out of our present orbit somehow, if only by a tiny amount, but large enough to upset the state of life here?
I know it's probably a little far fetched, but any scenario that could possibly affect life on this planet of ours should bear thinking about, right?
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The issue is lift technology.
Since a rocket is 95% fuel and O2 weights 8X the H2 in the propellant mix... the idea is whether something better than chemical propellants can be used.
Nasa did experiment with nuclear rockets and nuclear engines. Then they abandonded them.
Now... not being an aeronautical engineer I don't know if this could work... but I'll toss in the 2 sense anyway and hopefully I don't get criticised too heavily.
So here is the idea. If the ship is not manned then it doesn't need as much sheilding. This means if we could build a dirty plane that has big wings and can get off the ground with a nuclear motor and some rocket propellant - then we should have a heavy lift system.
Resistance to speed (friction) is proportional to the density of the air times the cube of the speed , right? and we have a continous denisty function of the air with a max at sea level and it slowly drops to virtually zero at 60 miles or so.
If a nuclear plane can take off and achieve some level of altitude then it should be able to use the air mass impinging on the craft as a propellant. Since it already has virtually an infinite energy density compaired to chemical one would think it should be able to slowly sprial up at ever increasing speed until it finally reaches orbital velocity.
Even if it took a couple days to do this... it would still be fine.
The only really big issue here is that sheilding is bloody heavy and without it the cargo will see lots of neutrons. Stowing away might not be a good idea.
Of course I know that this would not be a politically correct plane/spacecraft. I'm just wondering if people think it could actually work.
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Hmmm.. I just thought of something else. If the thing can be built then the astronaughts could ride in a little glider pulled by a long tether. The glider could have nice sheilding at the tether attachment point.
So what if the motor is a 1/4 mile ahead of you.
I guess the question is whether a nuclear sub reactor can produce enough energy for take off.
I think the answer is yes. But it might require some rather exotic materials because we're going to have to heat that air stream to several 1000 degrees C and that will require hotter than liquid salts.
I wonder, though, if an asteroid mining operation in earth orbit would constitute not only a national econamic asset, but possibly a military asset as well, a "clean" weapon of mass destruction.
I can imaging several world leaders saying "Look ma, no fallout!"
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Getting material back to earth requires reducing that cost per pound by several orders of magnitude.
The technologically literate consensus, which you and several moderators aren't part of, believes this possible.
However, explaining how in a way you can profit from will have to wait until somebody willing to dumb down the concepts to point-and-grunt level comes along, and I am not that person.
Space Elevator (if CNT tech gets there) or raligun technology as improved for the Strategic Defense Initiative (almost ready) seem to be the best candidates.
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Building and operating solar-energy collection satellites, gathering materials from the asteroid belt, and building and operating factories beyond earth's atmosphere can be done more efficiently from the ground?
Guess what. Robots capable of the flexibility of handling exceptions that humans have are science fiction and likely to remain so for quite a few years after we have working powersats and space stations.
You can argue that this will never need to be done, but if humanity listens to arguments like yours, our technological civilization goes out of business after the oil runs out a generation or less from now.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Well, since we've essentially raped our planet, time to move on to the next! I suppose whatever mankind must do to carry on will be justified no matter what. If the planet(s) is uninhabited, I suppose it's no big loss anyways.
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Why not conserve and use the materials here on Earth more frugally before sullying other planet(oid)s? There's plenty of raw material on this planet if we use it judiciously instead of landfilling everything.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Suppose we build a big long motor. We have a physical compression ram jet at the leading edge.. and it is long... maybe over 100 meters long. This compresses a sparce atmosphere into a chamber where we have heaters. Some of these could be radiant heaters for instance... our objective is to get that gas stream hot and into a plasma phase.
After the radiant heaters we might use a microwave heater. Once we reach plasma we pinch it and accelerate it and eject it at whatever velocity we can achieve.
Now... this needs to be really long because it has to work at 22000 miles per hour in less than 1% of atmospheric bdensity at sea level.
If 747 can carry a sub's reactor and we generate electricity from it then we _should_ be able to
build an air scoop that can open in flight to drive such a hyperspeed engine.
Initally it might open a wee bit at 40,000 feet and then the nuclear driven heaters take over and as long as they can produce more horsepower than the jet engines this puppy can fly.
One would want to build the wings such that the lift can drop to zero because this lets the space/place accelerate at any given altitude.
One really big problem is the incomming air stream will really heat the scoop (like burning up the space shuttle) so it may be necessary to ionize the air stream and use magnets to control it.
Does anyone think this can work?
Oddly enough, it's those two nations who have announced new and aggressive space programs.
What do they know that you don't?
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Who would like to be hired to be a labour for mining minerals on Mars? Think of the game called 'Red Faction' Probably it could mean more jobs, but certainly it would not be surprising to see some life forms on planets such as Mars seeing us invading their planet and making their planet look more like a Swiss cheeze as we have already done to some parts of our world already.
Space mining could be done by robots not by humans. If nanotechnology and Artificial Life sciences were advanced enough we could exploit the moon or mars or wahtever as follows.
;)
1/ Send intelligent & autoreplicable robots to the moon.
2/ The robots stablish there and build a base.
3/ They begin mining and build factories in order to build more robots, machinery and containers.
4/ They send back the extracted resources to earth using cheap big containers.
5/ Profit !
It sounds outrageous but I do beleive sometime in the future the process will be pretty much like this.
Maybe if someday we get fusion or something better. But chemical fuels are far too weak. We need a better propulsion system. It's worth noting that we haven't had a new energy source in the last half century.
Sending something to the asteroid belt that finds a small asteroid and boosts it back in our direction might be possible, but it's potentially rather dangerous.
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There are 2 places that the end results (processed ore) can go: Earth or space. Earth's enormous gravity well demarcates that ... anything from low Earth orbit (LEO) upward is essentially the same, since LEO requires a velocity of about 5 miles a second to maintain.
... you have no choice but use materials mined in space in order to live in space. Hence, the cost is irrelevent. Either you mine the Lunar regolith and asteroids for your air, or you will die. There might be possibilities for mining Earth's outer atmosphere, I'd imagine ... but you'd have to get close to the Earth for that, and the closer you get, the more fuel you'll need to get away with your payload.
... and as soon as possible you have to stop importing them from Earth since even that's too expensive, and start exploiting them from asteroidal sources. It also desn't seem to make economic sense to ship water to the Moon, since your cargo will be 89% oxygen, which is what the Moon has plenty of anyway (locked up in the rocks).
... divers have done without it by substituting helium. But helium is still a volatile on the moon. And plants raised in the Lunar facilities will need nitrogen for their root systems. So, nitrogen will still need to be imported in significant quantities.)
If it's Earth, you'd have to figure out how to (1) get the material there, and (2) down to the surface. Present technology can get it there with mass drivers, even off the surface of the Moon (and especially so, I'd figure). And after that, economy dictates that it be hard landed. Thus means you package the materials into ablative shells to make it as cheap as possible, and then let them smack into a desert area. After some time of bombardment, ground crews can venture out into the shattered zone and dig it up to collect the goods. Admittedly, it'll take some hard thinking and good engineering to come up with a way to sling the stuff down Earth's energy well without it coming in like a meteor; perhaps slingshot-then-return, perhaps atmospheric-skip-n-drag, perhaps even a mass catcher in Earth orbit. But these are engineering details.
The question is, is this kind of thing worth it for materials X, Y and Z? Once the costs of space development are amortized, I suspect that few materials will be appealing. This strongly suggests materials of a more processed nature, even products, which can be made in a space environment cheaper than on Earth. Arguably, with microgravity, some things can't be made on Earth at all, hence uniqueness can ensure a market.
As for space
Lunar regolith is great raw ore, in a good environment for smelting it. It contains all the stuff that you'd need to build a civilization on the Moon and in Cislunar space (even out to the asteroids, but once in the asteroids you will probably find it more economical to mine local resources). Regolith is finely pulverized from billions of years of bombardment, and not only yields aluminum, iron, silicon, magnesium and titanium, but oxygen as well. The downside to the moon is that it has almost no volatiles like nitrogen and hydrogen, and of course there's our old friend carbon. These must be imported (luckily, carbon imports for air can be tiny, although direct usage for plants and animals will be sizeable)
(According to an online source, the air we breathe has the essential component of about 20% O2. See here and here for Human and plant respiration respectively. The roughly 80% nitrogen component of air is an inert portion
Reaching for Mars without a Earth-orbit station and Lunar station is very foolish. It'll be another Apollo program that will result in a lot of abandoned equipment and horri
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Gold, silver, nickel, and palladium are all becoming extremely expensive and otherwise would be used for a lot more cool industrial stuff (slashdotters would appreciate cheaper gold => cheaper faster processors, for one). With India and China increasing their commodity demand as they grow we're going to hit some serious bottlenecks. Also, space mining would be an excuse to start doing cool stuff in space and making it affordable for the average guy to participate (yay free markets...).
Just send self-replicating miner robot to asteroid belt, with enough raw materials to start operations there. Then just wait couple of decades and go fetch piles of processed minerals back.
Resource cost is minimal as building and sending one robot is enough. Hard part is designing such robot, but it shouldn't be impossible even in the near future.
Sign me up. Take me! I wanna go! Please?
Let's see if I understand this correctly. Mars becomes an attractive propostition as a staging area for the belt.
A Mars colony has the potential to be self sufficient within a couple of hundred years. When I say self sufficient I mean it could survive if all contact with Earth was removed. But before that point Earth rules Mars via the threat of cutting them off from basic necessities.
So there's an Earth dependant colony for a couple of centuries, probably double that if Mars is diverting a significant portion of her resources and produce to support the belt mining activities.
If the wannabe Martians are being shipped up in one-way ships (as the article suggests) then the colonists are basically slaves to whichever corporations paid for them to get up there and send them supplies from Earth.
Not many people would voluntarily sign away their lives like that, to say nothing of their future children.
And what about the first born Martians ? They had no choice in being there but they're in servitude all the same.
How do you deal with the unemployed ? The elderly or those no longer physically fit enough to be productive ?
It would cost a shedload to send em back to Earth with no return on that investment and they'd be in permanent need of medical support once they got here (stronger gravity, higher atmosphere pressure, allergic reactions to common pollutants and probably Earth's flora / fauna).
In short the only way this becomes economically viable is with a reintroduction of slavery or penal servitude, and not just for individuals but for their descendants as well.
It is indeed a very close parallel to the UK - US - West Indies triangle trade, except Earth now takes the role of both the UK and Africa as a source of unwilling labour.
Make small robots that can repair each other to a limited extent .
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.
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Modular parts replacement, diagnostics probes, redundant CPUs,
and mandibles, etc etc . Make it simple, but tough
Make it remotely controllable like Mars pathfinder , but
with better terrain handling
Launch them from existing platform, ie. the space shuttle
The small robots mine the moon, and collect material in containers
they landed in on their arrival on the moon
Launch the mined material into space via rail gun and have it
come into high orbit around the earth
Robots waiting in high orbit prep it for return to earth via
a capsule method similar to returning the first astronauts
Alot of details to be worked out, but it is possible
Putting humans on the moon is alot more expensive than
robots that do not need food, air, or water
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
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"You have to live on space resources..."
You have to drink your own reprocessed pee.
That's what's keeping most of us on Terra Firma.
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It's common knowledge that Aliens are already on the moon mining.
Tell Bush there's oil on Mars.
I'll list these by the oz.
o ducts/MetalsUpdate.h tme tal_price s/
/ price_hi story.htm
Gold: 1980: 1000$
2003: 388$
1980 was a fluke. But if you go here, http://www.engelhard.com/eibprices/DPCharts.aspx
you can look up the average price for gold over the past 5 years. 298$. From what I've heard, it takes a price of 300$ just to break even on gold mining. Translation, gold is barely worth the cost of mining it.
Silver: Are you kidding me? The stuff was 5$ an oz when I was a teen. At the site mentioned above, it hasn't gone above 6$ in the past five years. Figure in inflation and you'll see how cheap/worthless the stuff is.
Nickel: Currently 4.5$...a pound. There was a blip in 1989 where it went up to a whole 6$ a pound! Again, factor is inflation to see these materials are just getting cheaper.
Sources:
http://www.macsteelusa.com/pr
and
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/m
Palladium: Interesting. A spike in 2001 where it hit 1100$ an oz. Currently 202$. The chart starts out in 1998 at 250$.
Unless you use this chart:
http://www.ruralcitizen.com/Price_History
So, where in the world did you get this idea that these products are becoming extremely expensive?
With one month's rent you could go buy your weight in Nickel.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I can't believe you are buying that guy's bogus claims. He sent a letter to the UN, and having received no reply he sees that as tacit approval. Try sending a letter to the UN claiming that the whole world belongs to you, and see if you get a reply. He has absolutely zero legal legs to stand on.
Yes. And, like with the land rush in America, whoever gets there first will likely have ownership. Just saying, "hey, I own the wester half of America" isn't good enough. Getting your ass there and staking claim is different. (Of course the America situation was a rip-off the the peoples that actually lived in the area)
From the samples of the lunar soil that were brought back, I think that we found out that the moon has a heavy concentration of titanium dioxide. For those that don't know, titanium is super strong, and super light. I don't know the mass or the tensile strength, but I have heard it is as light or lighter than aluminium and as strong or stronger than steel. The SR-71 is made of about 90% titanium and it isn't even practical at the moment except for very fast supersonics. Although having access to cheap titanium might make the airline industry a lot safer if our planes and cargo holds were titanium.
Hell we might bring enough back to build a few battleships or aircraft carriers.
Scientists even suspect that the moon has a titanium rich core.
I vote for mining, I think we could benefit from this. We could build machines to create the primary parts of the space station, the chassis so to speak, and then just ship up the internals and maybe an insulating outer layer. With titanium we wouldn't have to worry about micrometeorites as much because we could make the titanium thick enough.
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it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
I actualy sent a letter to the UN about owning the world...I have not heard from them so I must own it...so, GET OFF MY LAND.
Ever heard of ablative coatings?
The other obvious point is that if one can launch payloads continuously, 50 tonne individual payloads are neither desirable nor necessary. I'd be content with 1 tonne payloads... as long as 20 or 30 can be launched per day. 1 tonne looks easier than 50. Got any other straw men to torch?
They way we've done it in the past is through the application of stupendous amounts of money; that amount of money just is no longer available. Your governments have other priorities and aren't willing to spend 3-5% of GDP in space, regardless of how promising a few visionaries think it is. Heartbreaking, yes, but also a fact.
You might be right. If you are, this is either the last or next to last generation of technological civilization, unless humanity gets real lucky with hydrogen fusion. What happens after that? Dieoff. Though the waves of war over the last few billion barrels of oil may kill a good part of the human species long before it dies due to the inability to sustain the technological infrastructure needed to keep 10 or 15 billion people alive by 2020 or 2030.
Google on "peak oil" to find out what I mean. It should cure any delusions you have that we can keep on doing business as usual into the indefinite future.
We can do this now at a cost of 3-5% GDP (which I think exaggerated) or we can do it a generation from now at... 20-30% GDP? Which programs needed to keep people at the margins of society will get cut?
Actually, the most likely end to your scenario is that politicians will do nothing until no amount of expenditure of national resources can prevent disaster. Given your straw man arguments, I infer that this is the outcome you favor.
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Just like Space:1999!!!
I get the first Eagle command. Then I'm getting rid of Tony and putting the move on Maya!
"Hey, baby. How about looking like Crystal Gunns tonite? Oh yeah!"