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Company to Settle and Mine Mars
Rutgersen writes "Wired is reporting that a new startup is planning to colonize and mine Mars by 2025. From the article: 'The new company, 4Frontiers, plans to mine Mars for building materials and energy sources, and export the planet's mineral wealth to forthcoming space stations on the moon and elsewhere.'"
This is the kind of news I expect to read in 2005. Cool.
I hear this company is using the following computers:
6.8GHz 1TB RAM and 2TB HDD Laptop
Something about companies that have numerals in their names just makes them seem so reputable and trustworthy! I'm gonna sell my house and buy a butt-load of stock in them!!
i don't care
Today bleak despair swept across our fair world when it was revealed by the Council that the invaders from the evil blue planet have formalized their invasion plans, and may arrive in force in as little as ten years.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, stressed that there was no cause for alarm:
During the hyper-patriotic riot that followed, several Citizens were trampled. In its infinite Wisdom, the Great Council has posthumously decorated them as war heroes.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
As the old saying goes, "if it's too good to be true, it probably is."
Still, it's nice to see someone attempting to hold to their dreams. And I'd dearly love to believe that they will carry out such dreams. Unfortunately, I (and many others here) understand what a massive undertaking it is to reach Mars at all, much less place a settlement there. Nearly every company in existance bases itself on existing infrastructures. This company would be able to leverage very little infrastructure, if any at all! (Especially if they chose to use the wealth of undeveloped space technology.)
I'd love to see their breakdown of exactly how they plan to make this mission happen, and on what buget they think they're going to acheive it on. Will they use existing rocketry technology, or will they develop their own? What are the precise economic goals? Will they be relying on any other efforts (e.g. the CEV) to achieve their goals? Just how do they think they're going to get approval for nuclear propulsion? (See the Jobs page under Engineering.) Do they have any experience in these areas, or are they making it up as they go?
No. There are far too many variables to count for me to take this on face value. There simply isn't enough info. Perhaps others could shed some light on their long-term plans?
Update: It looks like the partly plan to make their money by building the technological infrastructure themselves. According to this document, they feel that they could be turning a $29.7 million dollar profit by 2010, 15 years before they establish their settlement! This document supposedly shows their plan of attack, but it seems so preliminary that it suggests that the company plans to make it up as they go along.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Great, there goes the neighborhood!
I know the typical Slashdot geeks will wet their pants over this, but this simply isn't reasonable, guys.
Mine WHAT? The economics and physics of the situation are such that Martian material is valuable for using on Mars or in Mars orbit. That's IT. And even then, what does Mars have? The only really importnant thing is organic chemicals and suchlike, because otherwise it is boring mineral slag.
All of these future claims are just investment ballons floated to fleece the easily duped. There are plenty of technological problems associated with mining Mars including lifting the mined material off the surface. Bob Park wrote in his book "Voodoo Science" that it would cost more than $800USD to put ~$300USD of gold into orbit. His conclusion was that if gold were available in low-Earth orbit, it wouldn't pay to go get it. That is the first thing they teach in an economic geology course.
The materials on Mars are no different than here on Earth, only the abundances are different. So you mine a bunch of aluminosilicates and then what? Do these people realize how much energy it takes to break those bonds? Where is their proposed power source? The amount of solar energy reaching Mars is less than here on Earth. I hope they weren't counting on that source. Nuclear energy might be useful, but I don't know of anyone who has done a uranium assay of Martian ores. Are we going to ship power to Mars? How is that cost effective?
Unless these people have gone through a complete analysis of what it costs to go to Mars then I can't see how any of them can make any claim of profitability, let alone put a target date on their venture.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Hmm... their real website seems to be slashdotted:
http://www.ua-corp.com/
Welcome to BS day on Slashdot. Although by 2025 they may well have a 6 gHz laptop with 2TB of disk space to take along.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
I DID read the article. Someone please tell ME how they are going to achieve this.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Who Should Own Mars?
Think of it as the ultimate X-Prize. An entire planet for the taking.
The day anyone comes up with a viable business plan (which the guys in the Wired article, unfortunately, haven't done yet - and probably can't do so long as there are no private property rights in space), put me on the first colony ship of homesteaders.
Of course, the temporary ban will eventually become permanent.
Can't happen? It already has -- See Antarctica. No one owns it. Most of the countries of the world have a treaty not to exploit it.
Think they'll just say, "Let them try and stop us? We're there, they aren't. We have guns." Please. Get over your frontier fantasies. That was possible when you had frontiers with fairly hospitable terrain (even if harsh). With Mars, there's no way you can set up a self-sufficient colony right away. They'll HAVE to have support from Earth. If Earth wants to shut them down, they'll just stop the supply rockets from going.
Planetary colonization will NEVER happen in this solar system. Look to asteroids and colonies in space for your space travel future.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
As long as they need to trade with Earth for at least one essential items, Earth will be able to browbeat them into accepting copyright conventions.
On the Bios page, the company's IP attorney is listed before the scientists and advisors.
Maybe, it's nothing.
Won't we ever learn from our past mistakes?
We learn plenty from our mistakes. We have numerous State and Federal departments whose intention is soley the protection of the environment.
What we don't do is implement what we learn.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
First, their CEO is going to declare himself King of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat. Then he's going to take a ride on a magic carpet to see the King of the Potato people, and beg for a pickaxe. Then, he will dig around endlessly until he finds the vault with a teleportation trap that leads to Fort Ludios. After slaying Croesus and a half dozen dragons, he'll take the money and invest it in a biotech company; that money will generate large amounts of biodata, which he'll exchange with Trade Master Greenish for a ride on the Inevitably Successful In All Circumstances to Mars.
On the surface of Mars, he'll carefully scour the surface, dodging renegade robots and flesh-eating insects. Eventually, he will find Torg, the robot that kidnapped Santa Claus, and use him to mine the planet. Naturally, the rock will need to be loosened first with the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. Piling it up, he'll take the return trip through a Gate Corps gate, reenter Earth's atmosphere in a spaceship shaped like a Galleon, (insert missing step here), and profit.
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
I am so glad to see capitalism working the way it was intended. To him who gets there first is rewarded with the spoils.
Other than the fact that the company is private/public and not a government agency, this has nothing to do with capitalism. National property boundries are purely political.
Yea! Lets rob another planet of it's resources and destroy it in our wake!
Explain this. Who is being robbed? Although the entire plan is ludicrous, isn't it better to use resources on an uninhabited planet in a way that cannot impact the earth's environment, where evereyone lives... of course you probably believe the the removal of the minerals from Mars will reduce it's mass, resulting in changes in gravitational balance in the solar system, resulint in use moving closer to the sun, resulting in more global warming...
Won't we ever learn from our past mistakes?
I'm tyring to remember the last time we mined something from another planet... must have missed that in my history books. Got a link?
Never underestimate the economics of scale.
For reference, here's the Delta-V chart that I'll be referencing.
Now getting on and off of Mars is the most expensive part. Yet at 4.1 km/s, it's far from unachievable. Because of the way that rocket engines work, the greater the Delta-V that is required, the more expensive the rocket must be. Since the delta-v for Low Mars Orbit is a bit more than half that of Earth. So it is quite feasible that existing rocketry could be used at a far lower cost.
Once in LMO, things become quite inexpensive. A Delta-V of 0.9km/s is all that's required to reach Phobos. With that tiny amount of Delta-V (which can be cheaply obtained via the use of ION engines), the spacecraft could pick up a ride on the Interplanetary Superhighway. This transfer orbit would allow the craft to get its cargo to Earth on little more than station keeping fuel.
Once at Earth, the cargo could then be decelerated and dropped into the ocean, riding atop a simple, mass produced, heat shield. The epoxy solutions used in the capsules should work extremely well and would be inexpensive to mass produce. The cargo craft could then boost itself back to the Superhighway (again with inexpensive ION engines) and repeat the process. Things become even more efficient when cargo is sent both ways.
A more in-depth analysis would be required to determine the precise craft and materials necessary to turn a profit, but it certainly *is* doable with modern technology. And with a colony on Mars, we could support Asteriod mining, a far more profitable venture.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Also if you can find extraterrestrial (not from Earth) fissionable material (uranium or thorium) that means you can avoid the risks and expense of having to launch it. A lot of people get upset if there's a proposal to launch a 100kg RTG. Well, to power a mining colony, they will need a lot more than 100kg of fission fuel. What kind of public reaction would there be to the proposal of launching several tons of uranium? It would be much better if they could dig it up on Mars and use it on Mars.
Some of the terraforming projects require moving asteroids of ice to Mars. Again, the only way you can do that is with a nuclear-powered mass driver on the asteroid, and it would be nice to not have to launch that much uranium from Earth.
So when my company starts its Mars base, the first thing we're going to do is find the uranium, and then we'll sell electricity, H2 and O2 to all the other companies that want to (effectively) sell dirt and water. I suspect there's a lot better markup on electricity than there is on dirt and water.
I assume there is uranium on Mars, but I've never heard of anyone looking for it or discussing it. It seems to me that if there are no extraterrestrial sources of uranium, that's going to be a big problem for colonization of space, because it really will take thousands of tons of uranium to provide all the power that's going to be needed for serious mining and fuel production. And no, solar power is not going to work for this. Mining and fuel production requires too much power for solar to be a realistic option. For any activities beyond Mars, solar gets even less realistic. As long as solar is the power source, power is going to be a very tight limiting factor, whereas if you've got a few hundred tons of uranium, power will not be the limiting factor.
Also I wonder if uranium would make a good radiation shield? It seems like DU would be quite effective for that?
The good news is that if you set up a reactor on one of Mars' moons or on an asteroid or in Mars orbit, you can make it enormous and not need any real containment structures. If the uranium is available, it might be much cheaper to build extraterrestrial reactors than it is on Earth.
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For Mars to become worth colonizing, it has to have something that is worth more than it costs to ship it back to Earth. At the moment, I simply can't think of anything that would qualify due to the high costs of getting it out of the gravity well and to Earth, Only when a material runs out on Earth and easily farmed asteroids will Mars become a profitable source, and the only thing I can think of that we're near running short on would be oil, and Mars isn't exactly Saudi Arabia, if you get my drift.
We'd be better off skipping Mars and heading to the asteroids for metals, comets for water, and the gas giants for methane/hydrogen/whatever. Personally, I think Mars may only become useful to inhabit if it was used as the anchor for support space stations for deep space mining elsewhere. Then it may be worth building an elevator to the surface and transporting up more common materials you'd otherwise get from Earth or asteroids.
Nevertheless, there is a decent chance that once there are regular commercial interests in deep space, Mars may be colonized for other reasons than resources. It may make a fine home for some group that wants to get well away from the rest of the Earth's population and can use existing commercial technologies to get them there cheaply. I'm thinking of survivalist groups, certain religious ideologies or simply highly independent people who want to go somewhere where they can live without interference from others. Say what you like about these groups, but they often take the hits in opening up wastelands and other undesirable places for eventual mainstream settlement.
But on Mars it's a lot easier than on Earth. First, safety is not as much of a concern. If you have a big radioactive spill on Earth, you've caused a lot of problems. On Mars, well, no one is drinking the groundwater anyway and the whole place is already uninhabited. So that greatly simplifies your factory.
Second, you don't need to run on 100% uranium fuel. Here on Earth, no one wants to generate plutonium for reactors because of proliferation fears (founded or not). On Mars, proliferation is not a concern. Anyone who has the technology to get to Mars should be able to build atomic weapons fairly easily, and atomic explosives will probably be needed for engineering work, so spending time worrying about proliferation on Mars is silly.
The good thing about being free to burn plutonium is that it's easy to make plutonium from the left-over depleted uranium. All you need is a big neutron flux, pump that through the depleted uranium, and you get plutonium fuel.
What this means is that on Earth, you need to mine 140 tons of uranium metal to get one ton of U235, which is the only kind that works as fuel. On Mars, you mine 140 tons of uranium metal, extract the 1 ton of U235, and use that to convert the remaining 139 tons of U238 to plutonium. We can't do that on Earth for political / military reasons, but we can do it on Mars.
So yeah, many of the same problems remain, but the whole process of going from uranium ore to energy would be a lot simpler on Mars.
Once you have a basic reactor going (enough to generate fuel) you can start lifting your raw uranium ore into Mars orbit. It's a lot easier to get off the surface of Mars than it is to get off of Earth. Then you refine it in orbit, where you can be as unsafe and messy as you want, you blast all the waste products into the sun, and you send back down your refined U235 or plutonium fuel rods.