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The Best Near-Term Future of Space Exploration?
An anonymous reader writes "Much fanfare has been made about manned missions to moons and planets, but little has been done about travel to the asteroids — until now. NASA is working on plans for a trip to the asteroids by 2025. This type of mission has great potential for positive economic return based on the fact that no effort has to be spent on getting in and out of a distant planet's gravity well. Yes, we should go to the planets, but we should master mining the asteroid belt for resources first because it is easiest. What do you think?"
Every metal that we currently mine in the earth's crust. They're all plentiful in asteroids, and rare on Earth. In fact, everything that we currently mine (copper, iron, zinc, platinum, gold, etc.) came from asteroid impacts. During the early formation of the planet, when it was still mostly liquid, all those elements moved to the core, leaving only things like calcium and silicon and carbon in the Earth's crust when it cooled. All the useful elements came from asteroid impacts after that.
The amount of wealth in metals in the asteroids is nearly unimaginable. A single small asteroid could be worth trillions of dollars.
There is no urgency to manned missions. We already mechanize as much mining on Earth as possible, to cut costs which include expensive miners (who get killed, maimed, and expensively buried for month).
If we want to mine space resources, don't bring people, make remote systems so good we won't need humans onsite.
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I know this is going to sound like a troll, but what's the point.
nasa has become nothing but a pet poodle that each new administration scraps the work of the previous one and wastes all the funding that went into it for some new vision.
I used to love space and nasa, but now days i just get annoyed.
I'm starting to agree with putting space in the private sector but not for the reasons the current admin' says.
i want space exploration out of the hands of the politicians.
exit soap box.
Doesn't matter. They were a whole series of missions, not just one mission, and they were done with technology far behind today's (especially computer technology). After what we've learned there, and with modern technology, we should be able to pull off a single asteroid mission for a similar cost. The big unknowns are 1) how to deal with sending people that far away, especially in regards to radiation, though keeping the trip short should alleviate that concern, and 2) how to actually extract minerals from the asteroid and bring them back to earth in quantities sufficient to make it viable. Should we capture the asteroid (assuming a fairly small asteroid here) and bring it to earth orbit, or mine it where it is (allowing us to work with much larger asteroids)?
Obviously, the first mission probably won't be profitable, but we just have to figure out how to scale it up.
I remember someone predicting that when Bush announced his planned trips to mars and the moon, it was really a politically astute way of dumping the space program without looking like he was dumping the space program. There was no provision for how to pay for these new missions and by the time actual funding was going to be needed, it would be somebody else's problem (without even having to paint the shuttles pink). Otherwise, the very real problems of what to do with the short term needs at NASA were going to be center stage and have to be dealt with in his administration. The lack of a shuttle replacement, problems with the existing shuttle's safety/reliability, how to maintain the ISS, etc.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
That's not really what I was getting at. If individual asteroids contain significant percentages of the total mined gold supply (a couple trillion), any successful asteroid mining is going to have a huge impact on the percieved value of all those metals (and just imagine a couple of capitalists in a friendly competition to bring back 50 times the amount of gold that is currently mined in a year, that would just barely show up over the decades it took to do it...).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Hmm, let's look at some numbers. In general, if it's coming in from outside our gravity well, it'll be hitting atmosphere at escape speed or a bit over. Or a whole lot over. But let's go with escape speed.
Let's assume we're talking a billion ton asteroid, just for round numbers.
So, escape speed, billion tons...impact energy is on the order of 40 gigatons of TNT.
So, which desert area will we use for safety?
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