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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?"
But someone has to play it.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Just tie a rope to them from your spaceship and tow them back to earth.
I am anarch of all I survey.
If your goal is to set up self-sufficient colonies independent of Earth, the asteroid belt is the best place to do it. But I don't think it will be economically rewarding without our lifetime.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The concept that space exploration to mine asteroids is easiest is, itself, questionable.
Each asteroid has a larger chance of inter-asteroid impacts.
Perhaps a better choice might be one of the moons of Mars, so that we can build a giant space ladder our robot overlords can climb up on the way to invading us?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Rare earth metals, the easily mined deposits of which our civilization will probably have depleted in the next 50-100 years. Already there are serious concerns about switching to renewable energy sources based on the low availability of certain key resources.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
IMO an asteroid mission is far and away the best choice for manned exploration. They have practically nonexistent gravity wells, making exploration relatively cheap, and depending on the target selected, could support making life support volatiles and rocket fuel in-situ. A good-sized nickel-iron NEO, on the other hand, could be an excellent prospecting opportunity -- depending on how big it is, it could supply enough iron to sate Earth's steel demand for a century or more -- or it could be used as a resource cache to bootstrap space-borne manufacturing. Mining space rocks isn't as glamorous as the moon or Mars, but the cost/benefit analysis strongly favors the asteroid.
They should visit a number of different types of asteroids and nuke them to see the effect. Its really important knowing what will and won't work in protecting the planet from an asteroid impact. We have zero experience in how effective nuclear weapons are in deflecting or distinguishing asteroids. I don't think we want to be doing this when threatened by a large asteroid collision.
Nothing... They would use the materials to build space habitats...
I'm disappointed it's a negative reaction that actually prompted me to log in for the first time in a over a year, but this story is crazy. The whole idea is crazy. Not because of technological limitations, but because we don't have a prayer of paying for it.
A few days ago, copponex wrote:
"America is basically like a 7-11 that's about to go under. The shelves are barely stocked, the sign has been broken for months, and nobody really gives a shit because they've been watching the boss raid the cash drawer for years."
I want to believe NASA could pull this off -- and by 2025 -- but I think it's tragically unrealistic from a financial perspective.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
I think you can go down pretty damn deep before "easily mined" from asteroids becomes more cost effective than "easily mined" here on Earth! You need to mine the asteroids for resources to use in orbit, not to send back to Earth.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Not sure if mining the asteroids will have an economical impact down here on earth. But what should be explored there is what we can do. Can we live there? Can we make self-sustained enough stations with materials found there? What about new ships or propulsing fuel? Good part of the cost and ecological impact of space exploration is actually getting into space, leaving planet gravity well. But if most of the needed resources are already out and we can have enough people there in a semi permanent basis, we can start thinking in more advanced space exploration and colonization, maybe getting cheap enough resources (think for what was used the space station in the movie Moon). Of course that are several practical problems, but could we solve them?
An approach to space exploitation (and thus exploration) has been known for decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space
Gerard K. O'Neill wrote this book decades ago, and I see no reason to deviate from the basic plan described within.
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.
The amount of wealth in metals in the asteroids is nearly unimaginable. A single small asteroid could be worth trillions of dollars.
oh sure, its in a nice neighborhood and all; but the commute's a real bitch.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Mining stuff here on Earth makes a mess of our environment (more so in some places than others; here in the Arizona desert, it pretty much just results in an ugly pit, but in West Virginia, mountaintop-removal mining causes all kinds of ecological problems).
Now people (like China) are already talking about mining the sea floor, because we've depleted everywhere else. The sea floor is a much harsher environment than space for humans; in space, you just need to design a vessel that can contain a measly 1 atmosphere of pressure. Sending people underwater is much harder since you have to design your craft to keep hundreds or thousands of atmospheres of pressure out. Of course, you can do a lot of work with ROVs, but there's still a lot of technical challenges there because of the depth, and the presence of (very high-pressure) water all around. Space is relatively easy to work in. The only problem is getting out of our gravity well.
Digging deeper into the crust isn't exactly safe, either. Ask the miners in Chile who are still trapped underground.
If it was, it wouldn't be.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Why manned? Sending robots on a one-way mission is always going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than sending humans and safely bringing them back home. However, sending humans on a one-way mission may be cheaper still!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
We don't know for sure.
We don't know for sure.
We don't know for sure.
This we know for sure: unless we do serious research we will never get the answer to any important question. And unless we are ready to research many different alternatives we will never be sure of our answers.
I think we should consider all possibilities and chose which one has the better probability of success. Exploring the asteroids seems to offer some interesting possibilities. At least there's an intrinsic advantage in getting resources from them, compared to any planet or moon in the solar system, given the different gravity wells.
Excuse the vent, but NASA has become lame as hell nowadays. What happened? From the space race in the 60s forward 50 years to now, isn't anyone else disappointed? I'm 31, and I was so excited growing up in the 80s, I couldn't imagine what I was going to see. Now, it seems to have all slowed to a crawl. Sure, Hubble gave us some amazing photos and scientific data, but where have the grand leaps and bounds in technology and sheer drive to explore been? Now, we have Obama hamstringing the space program as well, cancelling programs left and right. 2025? Ill be nearly 50, and I'd bet yet to see a man on Mars. I guess I assumed it would happen in my lifetime, and much earlier, even by 2010 at the rate things seemed to have been advancing. The idea of this is cool and all, but I really hoped we would push the envelope a bit harder, like the good old days. Sorry, I guess I'm just underwhelmed and disappointed.
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.
You forge the gold into a landing module and use a mass-accelerate to bring it back to earth.
Gold lander module meets atmosphere at oh 18 thousand mph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Re-entry_and_landing and said lander becomes gold soup. At this point your profit is pretty much fucked but you've got a really nice gold streak in the sky.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Why do you think metals? The best substance you could pull from an asteroid would be ice. Ice can be converted into fuel. Ice can be converted into oxygen. Ice can be converted into water. A good icy asteroid can supply three of the four main consumables of space exploration.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why manned? Sending robots on a one-way mission is always going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than sending humans and safely bringing them back home. However, sending humans on a one-way mission may be cheaper still!
I simply don't understand how anyone human can have this attitude. I'm all for doing most exploration via robitic means, but for man never to go to new areas himself? Further, if we don't do it, someone else... China, India, Russia, someone... is going to go. They're certainly not going to ignore the human factor.
Exploration isn't just about science, and never has been. In fact, even with the advent of the scientific revolution, I'd say science has been at best a minor motivation. Simply getting there is part of what makes us human.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I nominate the post above for the "Yogi Berra is Right" award because he is.
In fact, everything that we currently mine (copper, iron, zinc, platinum, gold, etc.) came from asteroid impacts.
Only in the sense that Earth is basically built of asteroids in the first place. But in that limit, you're just advocating mining on Earth again, the nearest and most habitable such body.
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.
Good lord, no. Certainly elements did tend to head to the core preferentially. Such siderophilic (iron-loving) elements are fairly rare in the Earth's upper layers. Others are still fairly common. Or at least common enough. Even iron, which lead the charge to the core during differentiation, is awfully common in the crust.
In fact, silicon (the second most abundant element in the crust) is only about ten times more common than iron, which is about as abundant as calcium (which you cite as being abundant). Aluminum is more abundant than calcium and is in fact only a few times less abundant than silicon. (Oxygen, incidentally, is the most common element in the crust, beating silicon out by a factor of a few.) In fact, most metals we're particularly attached to are about one-in-ten-thousandth as common as silicon. If you factor in the fact that they're usually found in clumps, that's a very cheerful thought.
(For the record.)
By the way, if your theory of asteroid delivery were true, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have very much metals to work with. The Earth's crust is tectonically recycled every several hundred million years (any given chunk has been subducted and recycled several times, more or less; we estimated this my first year of grad school, but I forget the numbers exactly), so you could only rely on the metals delivered in the past few hundred million years. Asteroid impacts are getting rarer all the time, especially big ones.
Also, recall that a given asteroid is as likely as much rock as metal. In fact, Earth is more metal per mass than the average asteroid. (A lot of our silicates ended up in the Moon instead.) However, some asteroids are definitely mostly metallic and for mining purposes, that's a mad bonus. (For metals raining down from heaven, however, you have to factor in the fraction of the asteroids that isn't metal.)
Also, you're not factoring in the costs of bringing metals back to the Earth (if that's your goal). It's far more expensive to do that than to mine them here and will be for the foreseeable future. Of course, if your goal is to use them in space anyway, then it might be better to mine them there. (On the other hand, then you have to build the refining and construction infrastructure in space, which has a lot of challenges of its own.)
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.
Solar energy is cheap in space. You could make a parabolic dish a mile across out of mylar potato chip bags and bendy straws, using the focussed rays to drive a steam driven electric generator. Delta-V is the costly item, and that means propellant, and once you find a big block of ice floating around somewhere, you've got your propellant.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes, but the worth of the asteroid's metals isn't measured in "future potential price". It's measured in "How valuable is it right now".
I think the mining idea misses the point. This NASA plan is all about gaining experience surviving outside of low earth orbit.
1: Surviving without the massive radiation shield that earth's magnetosphere provides.
2: Surviving without an option for quick Earth return.
3: Surviving without near instantaneous communication with ground control, Major Tom.
4: Surviving extended exposure to zero-g (muscle and bone loss)
Well #4 has already been worked out a lot at ISS though the amount of exercise needed is significant (less mission time) and not perfect (still need to get strong again when back on earth).
Shall we start debating the need for artificial G via rotation?
Also #2 has been somewhat worked over with ISS, specifically the need for lot's of spare parts, redundant systems, and design for easy repair. What's not so well covered is, wetware repair. MedBay anyone? Is there a doctor in the house?
You can say that there's billions of gallons of oil deposits, worth trillions of dollars, that are currently inaccessible due to technological limitations. That doesn't mean that it's worthless, it just means it's inaccessible.
A very long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (MIT, mid 1970's, when I was an undergraduate and a member of MIT"s Planetary Astronomy Laboratory of that era), I remember having conversations with Mike Gaffey about asteroid mining. I see a reference to Technology Review on asteroid mining from Mike in 1977, so I think this got all published; I don't have any TR's of that era around to refresh my memory.
I remember one interesting scheme, where you might take a m-type metallic asteroid (which is mostly iron, nickel, and other useful metals) to earth orbit, by any of a number of propulsion schemes (solar sail, ion engine, or the like). It would probably take a number of years to move it from the asteroid belt to earth orbit. Then foam the asteroid (use solar mirrors to make it molten, and inject gas), and shape it into a lifting body. Then you would fly it into the earth's atmosphere, and land it in the ocean outside any port you would care to deliver it to. The point of foaming it was to reduce its density so that it would reenter the earth's atmosphere without much heating and ablation (we don't want to dump lots of metal into the earth's upper atmosphere), and float when you landed it.
Then you take a tug boat and pull it to a dock, and you have however many kilotons of metal you like. And without the huge energy cost of mining and environmental problems on earth.
As I remember, all the physics work (without having to invent fundamental new technologies), and there are lots of metallic asteroids. Now we just have to figure out how to actually do it. And it is way, way easier to deal with getting to and from the asteroids than the moon or any planet.
- Jim
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.
Someone is forgetting that one has to get in/out of EARTH's gravity well which is the biggest one outside of the gas giants. Then you have to actually mine whatever it is (which we lack the technology to do) in deep space and safely bring it back intact. What are you going to mine in any serious quantity that you can safely return to earth without the item either burning up in the atmosphere or turning the item being returned into a weapon. (Remember that any significant fraction of an asteroid makes a heck of a divot when it hits the earth at high speed.) I can't imaging there are a lot of asteroids composed of precious metals floating around. Maybe there is an asteroid filled with inkjet refills or human blood?
Seriously, even ignoring the technical issues (which are huge) I haven't heard anything relating to mining asteroids that remotely makes economic sense. What could we possibly mine on an asteroid that could be worth the enormous cost of retrieving it from the asteroid belt? We only have a vague idea of what many of these things are composed of and what we do know isn't anything terribly rare here on Earth. The idea of mining asteroids is a romantic and cool idea but we would have to be SERIOUSLY in desperate need of something to make the economics of asteroid mining make any kind of sense.
Scientific research? Hell yeah. Economic return? Not likely in this century.
Depends on what you call "home", I suppose... (Seriously: thanks to Time for Timer[1], I used to think that the bacteria in my teeth had briefcases, and had some "home" that they went to, when they weren't busy removing my plaque... Ah, childish notions...)
[1] -- "When my ten-gallon hat is feeling five-gallons flat, I hanker for a hunk of cheese!" I think that did far more than the "Got Milk?" campaign did, especially when they started suing any "Got X?"-alikes.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Ok, the real deal here is manufacturing facilities, not mining per se. There are TONS of asteroids all over the moon, that could be used for early mining to support manufacturing on the moon.
And really the best way to "mine" the asteroid belt as one said in reference to hauling stuff, would be fishing for stones, and then hauling them back to the moon. Thrown down where it would be safe enough, but far enough from the manufacturing facility, and then hauled mined and manufactured back there.
THis would of course be multiphase and requires just tons of energy. Nuclear batteries are not likely to create enough energy, and other forms of nuclear energy require ALOT of water. So we have a basic problem in creating MINING and MANUFACTURING levels of energy. Energy to create steel for instance. Without water or internal combustion engines, it becomes tough to make that amount of energy.
If you think we've got population problems you clearly haven't been paying attention. East Asia, which has some of the highest population densities in the world also has among the lowest birth rates. The rate for China is lower than the US. Nations like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have among the lowest rates in the world. Most of Europe also has extremely low birth rates. If it weren't for immigration America's rate would probably be a lot lower than it is. I don't know if Europe still does it, but Japan's and Taiwan's governments have offered incentives to people who have children. What's the problem? If the trend continues they'll suffer dramatically in terms of talent and labor. And more importantly for governments they wont have enough people to help sustain social programs.
Fears of population explosions have so far proven to be unfounded. The nations which have the highest birthrates, namely African nations and South Asia also have high death rates. And there is the capability to sustain many more people on Earth than we have now. Despotic leaders, environmental issues and wars are the real problems facing more heavily populated nations.
What if the mining vessel either stops at Earth's orbit, deposits the ore, then returns? Or even better...
What if mining vessels don't even bother returning, and send chunks of ore in the direction of Earth with small directional rockets? Then we could steer the chunks into orbit.
Spare parts could be manufactured in orbit and sent back to the mining vessels (such as the small directional rockets, though their fuel could be collected from asteroids).
Ore that we want on Earth, could then be selectively sent down (somehow).
The cost of launching one vessel into space might then be mitigated by it being reused for a long time, for much more than a single load of ore.
Besides, when scarcity on Earth becomes severe, the cost of space mining might become alot more viable. And when I say "cost" I don't mean only financial cost.
The radiation problem is a big one, and I think the public doesn't yet realize how big of a problem it is. I mean, flight attendants and pilots are exposed to about as much or more than someone working in a nuclear power plant, so shouldn't they be wearing radiation badges? http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/21/1/003 Now fast forward 50 yrs, with asteroid mining profits starting to take off. Will similar health risks get swept under the rug?
What was cancelled to make room for the asteroid mission was the Mars mission. Why? Well, the administration says that the asteroids are closer. I Am Not a Scientist (IANAS), but through careful and methodical research I've determined that the moon is still closer. And it likely has minerals, has some gravity to help with biological issues like muscle atrophy, etc. Oh, and we've already gone there with 1960's technology, so it's a pretty close bet we could do it again.
The current big problem is getting mass to (or out of) orbit. If you want to pretend the government's best role is things like infrastructure, they should fund private companies to develop heavy rockets for lift, space factories for building space-launched rockets, or a space habitat that isn't in low Earth orbit.
My suspicion is the asteroid mission was selected because failure (or future cancellation) will be hardly noticed. However, everyone would certainly notice a habitat on Mars or the moon that we no longer use. The saying goes "If we can send a man to the moon" not "If we can rendezvous with an asteroid!"
Finally, there are no intermediate goals in the strategy. Just "get there." What we don't need is NASA to wander about for years developing "stuff" with no progress. We've already seen that for too many decades.
There are a lot of near-Earth asteroid, like Toutitis a few years ago. Send a mission to one, and alter its orbit so that it enters near-Earth orbit, say at geosync. Then we'd have a *real* space station, once we dug into it, and used it for raw materials, one that would have real protection against solar flares, and that could be used to base true deep-space ships (that only go from orbit to orbit) to the Moon, Mars and beyond. This would make interplanetary travel for humans far cheaper.
For that matter, we could use nuclear (steam) rockets from there, which would make trips a lot faster.
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