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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."
Even if it were a fact, they would not be very "valuable" any more after the market on Earth was flooded with them.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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.
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
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?
... 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.
Better idea: Let's move all the dirty, polluting, carcinogenous crap to orbit and to the Moon, and make the Earth a park.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Mining the moon or Mars makes a lot less sense than mining asteroids for lots of reasons.
an ill wind that blows no good
One average size asteroid is made up of trillions of dollars of metals alone, let alone things like iridium and other platinum-group metals that are rare on earth.
Spending a billion for returns of in the tens of trillions seems like a pretty good investment to me
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
If we reduce the mass of the moon, then we're in for some big-time trouble back here on Earth! Has anyone thought about what it'll do to the tidal system!? (or lack there-of)
Why bring fissionables up from Earth? The first serious space-mining proposal was in the 1950s, for mining the Moon for uranium.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Not so! They are a bloated, inept bureaucracy that needs to focus more on research and less on getting stuff into space. They need to get out of the launch business (except perhaps by leaning on their contractors to be more open to smaller companies in a non-discriminatory sort of way; notice the way Armadillo Aerospace had to bend over backwards to buy some 50% peroxide propellant from FMC and eventually went to semiconductor-grade propellant from another supplier, which is much better).
NASA performs quite a few interesting functions, like the development of the new ion propulsion system that they're using on more and more probes. The bad thing is that they're not setting themselves up as facilitators for others, they're setting themselves up as the only ones (except, say, Russia and the ESA).
Inflation is bound to happen, that's true. I've heard that a good sized (whatever that means) astroid has about a trillion dollars of raw materials. That sounds like incentive enough to me to start a mining process. Once we are able to mine astriods with some "ease" it should still be profitable to do it even it the value gets cut by 90%, that's still a shitload of cash.
Granted, that's a whole lot of number-making-up ans speculation but I'd bet that inflation wouldn't be a deterent for a long time.
Blaze a trail to the New World
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
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.
You can't imagine how far-going are ecological precautions in Antarctica.
(feces taken away by plane)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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
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"
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.