Slashdot Mirror
"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."
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
You must be fun at parties.
Mining asteroids in EVE is one of the lowest paying professions one can engage in. Perhaps NASA would be better served to focus on killing the spaceships that they encounter around the asteroids for bounties.
I mean hell, the morons in Washington can't even decide if we should build any kind of space ship.
Not trolling, just curious ... if landing on an asteroid is difficult at best*, and the chances of the asteroid moving in the direction of your ship's travels are slim to none, how does going out of your way to land at a "docking station" that is moving you further out of your way to get some resources beneficial? Won't restocking the personnel or supplies on any asteroid "mining station" eat up more resources and money than they can ever harvest?
* kind of like playing 'quarters' by hitting a cup racing past on the back of a flatbed
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 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.
if landing on an asteroid is difficult at best*, and the chances of the asteroid moving in the direction of your ship's travels are slim to none
Why do you assume either of these? Asteroids are orbiting the sun. Their orbits are predictable, modulo some minor variations caused by the (very weak) gravity of nearby ones. It's much easier than, for example, landing on an aircraft carrier, where you have to worry about changes in the wind.
As to the probability of them travelling in the same direction, it's pretty much guaranteed. If you're going from the Earth to the asteroids, you use a transfer orbit, where you are starting in the Earth's orbit around the sun and then injecting enough energy to move you out to the asteroid belt. You end up on solar orbit in the asteroid belt. Any asteroid in the same orbit will, by definition, be going in the same direction and speed as you. Asteroids in nearby orbits will have a small relative speed, and the energy required to enter a transfer orbit to rendezvous with them is relatively small.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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.
Multiple citations needed.
I don't know where you pulled those numbers out of, but they're completely wrong. Depending on the process used electrolysis can have an efficiency rating of 30%-60%. Nuclear reactors are much better than 20% efficient, unless you think an RTG is a nuclear reactor. Solar thermal power is a better bet for generating large amounts of power for running a space factory. No fuel needed and a few square kilometers of mylar will set it up nicely.
872835240
Basically, no.
In somewhat more detail, slightly. Reactor coolant tends to get radioactive after a while. But a nuclear rocket doesn't have any particular part of the coolant present for "a while", since it goes in one end and out the other without any potentially embarrassing recirc.
So, in general, if you used H2 as the reaction mass for your reactor, you could expect some non-radioactive deuterium moderately (which is a joke, in case you didn't get it) regularly, and an atom or so of tritium now and then.
If you used water, the same plus some O-17 and less often O-18.
Note that the amount of radioactive H@ (and O2) will be dependent on the reactor design. Some neutrons are easier to capture than others....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The Mylar solar mirror could be aimed at Titanium Oxide solar assisted electrolysis, making that process even more efficient.
Water would be prefiltered using existing NASA water filtering technology in use on the ISS now.
But what really strikes me about AH's answer is even with his engineering challenges which are overcomeable, and horrible energy to fuel ratio guesstimates.
This Rocket fuel assembled in space 24/7 in the asteroid belt would likely still be cheaper than if we created the fuel on Earth, and flew it out to the asteroid belt on a rocket.
It costs me $10,000 per kilo to get something to LEO, ususally assuming 80% of the rocket's mass is fuel the rest is the vehicle istself and payload, so we have at least 4 to 1 efficiency loss, probably more. It costs more to more to boost it to GEO, you use a transfer orbit, maybe even a solar sail to get to the belt but you're still burning fuel to stop and maneuver when you get there. How many kilos of fuel have I burned to get 1 kilo of fuel to my fuel depot in the asteroid belt?
ANY Explorer will have to learn to use indigenous resources at some point to stay in the field longer, or permanenetly. We cannot continue to rely on fuel made and shipped from Earth for any serious missions beyond our own orbit.
Even your unmanned probes would work better with an unmanned fuel depot halfway to anywhere.
And no under our feet does not work, only a tiny percentage of the Earth's crust is mineable. And we've gotten all of the easy stuff already, if you look at how many tenths of an ounce per ton is considered profitiable for miners that then use acid solutions to reduce the ore down to what they want, and tailings (the waste) you end up with tons of industrial waster per ounce of useable material.
It has gotten so bad that many companies are now using current technologies to reprocess the tailings of mines/plants closed in the 1970s because those leftovers are richer in what they want than the new mines they are finding.
There IS more raw material in the belt than all of the Earth, and at higher concentrations than any mines being operated anywhere on the planet.
Now, tell me if you really believe what you've said, how much Helium / Helium 3 there is here on Earth, under our feet? What is the cost per ounce?
Helium 3 is $46500 per troy ounce.
Helium we get from Nuclear decay, Helium 3 we get as a byproduct from manufacturing Tritium for Nuclear bombs, we haven't made it in industrial quantities for a while, but there are numberous Medical Imaging and Fusion research uses for this limited resource.
How much is there on the moon?
How many Rare Earth Elements are available in the Belt that would make more efficient magnets for Hybrid Cars and High Speed Trains, but Neodymium is about $1 per Gram, and the price will go up the more demand for Hybrid and Electric vehicles goes up.
How many CD players and Cell phones would you have to recylce the magnets from to come up with the Kilo of Neodymium used in the motor of 1 Prius?
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.
That only applies to solo flying, what if it will be a formation flight?
I see what you did there.