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"Wet" Asteroids Could Supply Space Gas Stations
FleaPlus writes "Water ice was recently discovered on the large asteroid 24 Themis, and Space.com discusses proposals for producing fuel from asteroid ice. NASA and the President recently announced plans for robotic precursor missions to asteroids (and a human mission by 2025), as well as a funding boost for R&D to develop techniques like in-situ resource utilization. Since most of the mass of a beyond-Earth mission is fuel, refueling in orbit would be a huge mass- and cost-saver for space exploration (especially if fuel can be produced in space), but a large unknown is how to effectively extract water in an environment lacking gravity."
Will they have an attendant hassling you to buy 2 packs of gum for $2 every time you fill up?
I said it all along. Mining asteroids should be NASAs priority. I hate to say I told you so :P
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
I am sure BP has a very save solution for the extraction of 'fuel' in space.
This could also provide good jobs for the inhabitants of these asteroids, serving Starbucks coffee and Cinnabons.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Maybe you should seriously consider leaving afghanistan and iraq, then rejuvenate your lousy economy, ain't it?
Do you have to actively work to create sentences like this? Is there some kind of system of analysis and theory behind poor sentence construction that you employ? I can't imagine anyone would actually be able to write like that without concerted effort and thought put into it, and yet you trolls do it every day. Perhaps it is an under-appreciated art.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
...training Ice Harvesting!!
a large unknown is how to effectively extract water in an environment lacking gravity
Easy, bring the asteroid down to earth to extract the water. I don't see why they have to make it so complicated.
My webcomic
... it seems like a more suitable source of gas would be Uranus.
...wait, they'll give handj-- I mean, I can go to Starbucks on these asteroids? Sign me up!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
I mean hell, the morons in Washington can't even decide if we should build any kind of space ship.
It is probably incorrect to directly equate fuel with reaction mass. They can mostly be considered the same thing in a conventional rocket but if you could find another source of reaction mass then the fuel would only need to drive that mass away from you.
So I'm thinking that raw chunks of asteroid could become that reaction mass... pick up chunks of passing asteroid and throw them really really hard in the direction opposite to the one you want to travel in. Anyone following you might be in for a hard time though, but that's what the expression "eat my dust" is for.
No need for electolysis. Just extract it and off you go. Methane, CO2, etc could be used as well.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Gravity is can be simulated through constant acceleration. To extract water, you use fractional distillation by heating the asteroid material using concentrated sunlight in accelerated frame of reference. A spinning structure has been the traditional concept of how to create "artificial gravity". Another idea would be to fling asteroid material away using mass drivers to accelerate the whole rock.
From TFA:
"... the water could be broken down into its component parts (hydrogen and oxygen) to make rocket fuel, experts say.
"Water is the main component in how you might make propellants," said Jerry Sanders, leader of in-situ resource utilization at NASA's Lunar Surface Systems Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'If you're going to go repeatedly to an asteroid, then the ability to basically start setting up gas stations could be extremely beneficial"
Hey, I love the whole space-gas-station idea, I really do, but I would also really like if we took this concept of making fuel from water AND DID IT RIGHT HERE ON EARTH.
After the mexican gulf and it's oil, let's polute space with giant water spills! Who the hell had that good idea at Nasa?
The article states that the main mass of a ship for beyond earth missions would be fuel. Would this be true if we were using a form of nuclear propulsion? All safety/weapon/treaty concerns aside, isn't sticking with liquid fuels for space exploration spitting in the face of real technological development?
I think it is reasonable to research refinement and production in zero gravity in general. But arent we wasting time trying to create liquid fuel in space if nuclear is a more feasible solution?
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Why not set a mission to bring the Apophis asteroid into earth orbit since it's trajectory brings it closer to us anyway? We wouldn't have to worry about sending a probe or exploration team out to the distant reaches of space to do a small science project about water mining. We could knock out two technologies at the same time. Learning how to effectively maneuver an asteroid, which seems to be a hot topic as it is. Also, asteroid mining - for pretty much whatever. We would have the damn thing in our back yard and could do whatever we wanted with it.
the water could be broken down into its component parts (hydrogen and oxygen) to make rocket fuel, experts say.
Gee, sounds simple. Except that rockets generally run on -liquid- oxygen.
You are going to need one hell of an infrastructure to manufacture/store LOX, even more so for liquid hydrogen.
Theory and practice are pretty far apart on this idea, to the point where I would call it impractical.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Maybe you should seriously consider leaving afghanistan and iraq, then rejuvenate your lousy economy, ain't it?
Do you have to actively work to create sentences like this? Is there some kind of system of analysis and theory behind poor sentence construction that you employ? I can't imagine anyone would actually be able to write like that without concerted effort and thought put into it, and yet you trolls do it every day. Perhaps it is an under-appreciated art.
You would write something like that - in one of the Scandinavian languages.
This is blinging
Your basic laws of physics limit this to a mostly laughable concept.
You can't make "fuel" out of water, not without the addition of about 9 times the energy you'd get by just using the original energy.
For example, to break up water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, you can use electrolysis, which is only about 11% efficient, so you need 10 units of electricity to make one unit of H and O. On an asteroid, you're gonna have to get the electricity from a nuclear reactor/turbine system, which itself is only going to be about 20% efficient (and you're going to need a few acres of heat-sink to condense the working fluid). So we're up to throwing away 49 units of energy to make one unit of H and O rocket fuel. Or you're going to need a very large and complex solar collector with super-complex metallurgy to generate a high enough heat to disassociate the water. And then there's the extra energy needed to compress and liquefy the fuels. Plus there's the not so small problem of anode poisoning and mineral clogging. The water up there is probably going to be heavily contaminated with typical asteroid junk like sulphates and phosphates. Those will poison the electrolysis anodes and clog up the solar disassociator toote-suite.
The whole idea is really, really, far out, with a negligible efficiency at best and dismal chance of success.
IANARS, but "extract water in an environment lacking gravity" doesn't seem like that hard of a problem.
Water's a fairly easy substance to deal with - nonexplosive, liquid at easily reachable temps, possibly bound in the asteroid in nothing more significantly complex than an ice conglomerate.
Crushing/pulverizing the regolith and then tossing the mess into a gentle screen centrifuge with even moderate heating (ie above 0 deg C) would seem to do the trick - the water would just flow out the centrifuge walls...wouldn't even have to be 'batched' but could run as a constant process. The spin rate wouldn't even have to be significant, just enough to let inertia do its thing and force the water from the slurry.
At least to my ignorance, this seems at least an order of magnitude LESS difficult/dangerous than electrolysis in zero-g, something we've (AFAIK) got a pretty solid grasp of.
What am I missing?
-Styopa
but a large unknown is how to effectively extract water in an environment lacking gravity."
With a silly straw, Silly!
This exact scenario was the subject of Isaac Azimov's first published story, Marooned Off Vesta, published in 1938.
I've known far more than my share of Swedes and Finns, from my mudding days, and they always had excellent English, both written and in person. Yes, accented slightly but quite excellent.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Put a bag over the asteroid (or part of it, like a greenhouse) and microwave it. Collect the vapor.
http://www.marxist.com/
what you need is a forge, a metal shop, a greenhouse, living quarters, a large solar concentrator array, a sizeable asteroid with ice in it, and you could probably bloody well live on the thing.
The mining laser was the second most awesome piece of pseudo-technology in Eve (preceded by the "pod", a minispaceship which is both the means of immortality and getting anywhere you want at 1.5 AU/s, it's basically the logical conclusion of the TV, couch, and potato chips technology). You could shoot a rock from up to 20 or so kilometers away and get lots of economically viable stuff out of it. In third place was the "Blueprint"/automated factory combo which allowed you to make extremely complex stuff (like enormous internet spaceships) for the cost of materials and a little upkeep. I believe the "exotic dancer" technology was in fourth place...
And yes, I am fun at parties.
Besides Solar Energy being more present in space (I think most of it gets "mirrored away" by the atmosphere), which would make solar energy far more efficient in space, than on earth, I can only think of the heat argument as somewhat questionable, since I always thought, that space is "somewhat" cold.
Correct me if I am wrong, but cooling systems should be far superior in space, too, or not?
I mean if you shield away sunheat with your solar collectors, behind that it should be pretty cold, or not?
So, the proposal is to extract ice (spending energy to do it), then thaw the ice into water (spending energy to do it), then electrolyze the water (spending energy to do it), then use obtained hydrogen and oxygen gases as fuel (to get energy).
Had these guys ever heard of First Law of Thermodynamics?
If energy allocated to achieve all that comes from an source which is external to the ship (say ... solar panels), why don't they just use the energy they have to accelerate and throw back any material they can get their scrapers on? Reactive propulsion works on the basis of conservation of momentum and it will work with whichever mass you have at hand, as long as you are able to hurl it in direction opposite of direction which you wish to go.
I understand that H+O can be made to get very high v in p = m*v when combusted, but some sort of mass driver (electrostatic for small particles, centrifugal for pebbles and rocks is fine too) could very much compensate missing v with more m.
Much cheaper energy-wise, too.
people apparently think hydrogen powered cars are great because they only release water as a pollutant
except the amount of energy you are going to use just to make the hydrogen is going to produce significantly more pollutants and waste significant amounts of energy
so the most environmentally friendly and most efficient energy system will always be the system with the least amount of steps from source to use
solar->electricity->hydrogen->electricity->motion
is inherently worse than
solar->electricity->motion
or even
solar->electricity->battery->electricity->motion
the difference between the energy required to free hydrogen as opposed to the energy required to charge a battery is huge
hydrogen is a joke
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The whole topic is nonsense. They can't even pull oil from the Gulf floor without having a disaster.
If it doesn't make rich, some pig-banker who worships the holes blown through Iraqi children, it won't happen. And you know it.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
There are vast quantities of water and hydrocarbons in space. The problem is free oxygen.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
... if we bring stuff from space to earth, we would be increasing the mass of the planet. Are we going to dump stuff of equal mass INTO space to balance it out? If so, what?
OK, so, water is just the ashes of oxygen and hydrogen burning together, OK?
Burning together roughly the way we burn them in conventional rocket thrusters.
So, in order to succeed, the recipe will be:
1) get to icy asteroid, mine it, get water
2) magically turn back the water into its original components, before burning: O2 and H2 (???*)
3) burn them again together in your thrusters, and profit!!!
(*) yes, you can use a solar panel. Just let me bet that the mass of solar panel + water extractor + electrolysis apparatus is larger than the ordinary, earth-brought mass of fuel that'd bring the same thrust.
Sorry to be skeptical folks; please, do go playing with your asteroids while I develop actual, usable rocket science ;-)
Herve S.
"Wet" Asteroids Could Supply Space Gas Stations
Do we really have to have headlines like this? Why not just call it an "Ice Asteroid"? That would be accurate and there would be no need to resort to the 'Wet' label, as if this was some new kind of asteroid. Are we so stupid that we have to call it a "Gas Station"? Just say fuel. Did someone think that would be too confusing? Have we devolved to a state where most slashdot readers cannot comprehend that a fueling station serves the same purpose that a gas station provides for cars?
but also fuel cells to drive the various electrical systems onboard.
That is, unless the plan is to lift a nuclear reactor out there, as is used in submarines.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Using electrolysis to split water isn't difficult at all. Children can do this.
Electricity can be supplied by a nuclear fuels and devices brought to the asterioid. If it is close enough to a star, photovoltaic or other "solar" energy collection devices may be used. This can power and heat the electrolysis plant.
"Gravity" can be generated by accelerations such as angular momentum (just make a carousel to hold the electrolysis cells).
Hey, NASA, Where's my $40 million?
(I am sure NASA will waste billions of dollars on this this. I just want my cut.)
Give these people eyre!
Whether or not landing on asteroids is easy (I have my doubts - their motion is likely to be at least somewhat chaotic), there's a more important problem. We're talking about water here, which doesn't, you know, make a very good rocket fuel. Being as how it's already oxidized and everything. TFA indicates that for this to work, you'd first have to grind up some substantial amount of ice-containing rock, microwave it for a while, separate and purify the water... and then you get to electrolyze it. In other words, you need to dump an enormous amount of energy into it. So to do this, you'd have to ship a really large amount of equipment to said asteroid - solar collectors, electricity distribution and storage systems, rock-digging/grinding equipment, microwave machines, electrolysis equipment, hydrogen/oxygen distribution and storage systems, etc, etc. And presumably this all has to be automated, so you need to include computer equipment and then figure out how to actually do automation of a process this complicated.
You'd also need to figure out how to dispose of your rock tailings in such a way that they don't produce a giant abrasive cloud around the asteroid you want to work on, which would almost certainly screw up both incoming vehicles and your solar collectors and other equipment.
I highly, highly doubt you'd be able to make enough trips back and forth to this asteroid for such a system to pay off (all this is going to be extraordinarily expensive to build) before it broke down.
Bottom line: this idea hasn't even gotten to the half-baked stage yet. I wouldn't be bidding up the price of asteroid real estate at this point.
Ok, so I build the giant mylar bag mirror, and focus a bunch of sunlight onto the surface of the asteroid. What do I have now? Hot rocks with the water ice vaporized out of them and escaping into space. Even if you could somehow focus enough solar energy onto the surface to actually electrolyze water (without actually vaporizing the rock substrate), you've not even postulated a way to collect the product.
If you were planning to do something different with your reflected sunlight, it wasn't obvious from your post.
This is the thing that always trips up the /. crowd. Making a few wisps of O2 and H2 via electrolysis in space is one thing. Making volumes of liquid O2 and H2 sufficient to actually power rockets that go somewhere is an entirely different story. It's going to require a simply enormous amount of infrastructure, all of which would have to be shipped from earth, and it would have to be completely automated. I doubt we have the technology to do this at all, and certainly not at a price anyone would be willing to pay.
use it in balloons
oh no, wait...
oh, the humanity!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
its a gas
it has to be stored under pressure
additionally, its easier just to put electricity in a battery, and cheaper, in terms of wasted energy, than to cleave water
this includes all the wasted energy lugging around heavy hatteries (which, with modern lithium ion batteries, are nowhere near as heavy as your lead acid reference point)
hydrogen as a fuel source is just too wasteful in terms of supply creation AND its much more difficult to manage and deliver
hydrogen is a dead end idea, i'm amazed at how much attention and money has been spent on that folly
better battery tech is the future. but even with existing battery tech, batteries are superior to hydrogen. unless you can tell me you can find some way to generate tons of hydrogen directly from some abundant cheap source, hydrogen ain't happening
heck, even methane, which is cheap and dug out of the ground as is, is inferior to batteries, simply as a function of management and delivery
enough with the wasted time and money and effort on hydrogen. the idea is seriously thermodynamically challenged
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
of SINISTAR!!!
..while angels dance on pinheads.
We can't even commercially do this on earth, what makes them think they can do it in space?
With our luck, the engineers will mix up 'gallons' and 'liters'.
Come on now, these concepts have been bandied about for literally decades. I read about this when I was a kid more than three decades ago.
The mineral wealth contained in the asteroids of the solar system is literally incalculable. It's been estimated that one mid-size near earth asteroid (say a few km in diameter) of the proper composition probably contains enough metals to supply the world's demand for decades. It's all out there for the taking, along with plenty of free energy, and it's not at the bottom of steep gravity wells.
Yeah, it is rather difficult to get to them, and mining even one would require a massive investment in time and resources and take decades to accomplish. But the potential returns/benefit of doing so are enormous.
I know that Jerry Pournelle is not liked here, in general - those of you around in the earlier part of this last decade understand why - but he said it well, once: "We could turn Earth into a park, and have all the metals and energy we need, and more."
If we really want to move into space and establish a permanent presence there, we should start by learning how to use the resources already there.
Sigh.
Oh, and water makes an excellent fuel. One can either split it using solar energy into hydrogen and oxygen, or use it as reaction mass by running it thru a nuclear reactor. Also water - even water out there in comets and asteroids - is likely to contain deuterium and tritium, as well; if we ever manage to figure out fusion (we will eventually, I believe)...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
fuck petroleum and all the wahhabi islam it funds and the air it pollutes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Every molecule necessary for life as we know it found on an asteroid is a leap forward for panspermia as a theory. No longer need the materials come from a planet; this provides some evidence that they can be indigenous to the asteroid itself.
If water can be cheaply broken down into hydrogen and oxygen.. Why does it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to put a rocket in orbit when America is surrounded by the stuff!
www.boznz.com Simple solutions to complex problems.
and refried beans give me the wet asteroids. Try some more fiber in your diet.
The main problem isn't whether you could get the technology to work (although it would be very, very difficult). The main problem is that you couldn't do it at a price anyone would be willing to pay. Doing all the stuff called out in my post would be absolutely insanely expensive.
There's a much cheaper solution to the problem you mention: it's called birth control. And we're already doing it - global populations are on track to plateau in the fairly near future. And there's no reason why we can't move to totally renewable energy, and completely recycle minerals on earth. The technology for that is actually a lot cheaper and more developed than finding, mining, processing, refining, and returning minerals from the asteroid belt.
Come on, dude. Water, as pointed out in my post, is OXIDIZED hydrogen and oxygen. To turn it back into rocket fuel requires the aforementioned enormous expenditure of energy. Which would be prohibitively expensive to do in space.