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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."
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]
Why go shopping for asteroids when they deliver? Sure, the delivery schedule and drop-off point is unpredictable, but hey - free minerals!
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
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
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.
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.)
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 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?
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.
Of course there is air in space.
There's an air in space museum.
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!
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