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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?"
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.
I prefer to just sit there in the middle of the asteroids, spinning around while shooting missiles at them to break them into smaller and smaller pieces...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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.
--
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If it was, it wouldn't be.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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.)
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?
Perhaps watching 'The Empire Strikes Back' is not the best way to learn Astronomy.
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
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?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.