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!
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...
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.
Why go shopping for asteroids when they deliver? Sure, the delivery schedule and drop-off point is unpredictable, but hey - free minerals!
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.
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."
Sure there is. Think of the amount of raw rock we could utilize. We could make large rocks and small rocks, and even dust if we wanted to.
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
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!
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
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
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.
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
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?"
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.
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.
Earth's escape velocity is about 11km/sec, while the velocity required to go from the surface of the moon to the earth is only about 2.3km/sec. Energy is proportional to velocity squared, so it works out to take only about 1/21 of the energy. (leaving the Earth/moon system entirely from the surface of the moon is somewhat more expensive, but still only about 1/16 of the energy cost as that needed from the Earth's surface.)
Ladies and Gentlemen...we are forgetting a little thing called "the force" here arent we.
Is space mining feasible? YES! With the force.
The force is strong in this one, give him a pick and a wheelbarrow!
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
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.
It all boils down to this: The "Galaxy Far, Far Away" is small and dense. Since it was "a long time ago", this seems likely, because we live in an expanding universe.
Evidence: Light speed is a big freakin' deal. Han's ship can just barely pull it off for short bursts, and he routinely outruns top-of-the-line Imperial Cruisers by doing so. Most of the time, the Falcon, like most other ships, coasts along at sub-light speed.
All these people travelling below light speed are going from one star system to another in a matter of hours or days on a fairly regular basis. This means that most of the stars are only a few light-hours apart, and crossing the galaxy from a place as remote as Luke's homeworld all the way to the capital planet near Galactic Central Point is a mere matter of days. Let's be generous and say that the whole galaxy is about a light-year wide.
Now consider that the thickness of our own galaxy, even way out here on the fringes of the unfashionable Eastern Spiral Arm, is about three thousand light years, you get a sense of how tiny their galaxy really was.
In a galaxy where the stars are that close together, it stands to reason that "deep space" is not really that deep. There's still some gasses in high orbits over planets. (Whatever gasses they are, they are not very refractive, because it still looks like deep space... and they are not very dense, because some of the ships, like the B-Wing and the Slave 1, get by without being very aerodynamic.)
This is why you hear R2 beeping, Tie Fighters exploding, weapons firing, etc.
So those of you who are physically incapable of saying to themselves "it's just a movie" can finally sit back, relax, and enjoy the film. Space flight in the Star Wars setting is not the same as space flight in the here and now.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
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?
um, look at the exponents in this sentence: You could move 1 million metric TONS (10^9 kg) of material from the moon (7.3 x 10^22 kg) to the earth (6 x 10^24 kg).....and nothing would change. About 60,000 tons (6 x 10^7 kg) of material fall to the earth from space each year anyway.
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.
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.
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
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
Of course there is air in space.
There's an air in space museum.
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.
I don't want to burst your bubble here but what the government giveth, it can take away. How much effort does it really take to change their minds and declare the band regulated? And since there is yet any commercial space travel, why would we need a governing agency? Don't you think that creating an agency to regulate an industry that doesn't exist would create a more bloat than already exists? Where do you think all the regulators would come from? Seems to me, all those goverment workers in nasa! Btw, I work as a contractor for nasa, and they do some really great things in materials science, atmospheric sciences though remote satellite sensors, and propulsion technologies. The shuttle and ISS are extreme examples of bloat. But a large portion of what nasa does it does extremely well.
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
Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?
Seastead this.
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!
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 : )
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
In the 1960s, it was a young, brash agency with a mandate. Now it's just another government bureaucracy.
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.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
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"
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?
Oddly enough, it's those two nations who have announced new and aggressive space programs.
What do they know that you don't?
Tech Public Policy stuff
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.]
If you drive a newer car it was welded by a robot, if it is a .
, .
.
.
.
foreign car and not subject to US robotic limitations due
to union labor laws, ALOT more of it was built by robots
The mars pathfinder was a tiny robot, and the delay for remote
control was horrendous, but the moon is not that far away
it is fairly feasible
All nuclear fuel rod withdrawal systems in North America were
switched to robotic after the armies disaster with a slipped
fuel rod killing an engineer back in the 60's
All mass produced surface mount soldered printed circuit boards
are populated component wise by robots . Then the solder paste
is liquified in an Infrared oven
Robots and machinery are better than you know when they are
machined and controlled to the right engineering specs
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"