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NASA's Garver Proposes Carving Piece Off Big Asteroid For Near-Earth Mining
MarkWhittington writes "According to a July 26, 2013 story in Space News, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver mused about what appeared to be a change to the space agency's asteroid snatching mission at the NewSpace 2013 conference. Apparently the idea is to send a robot to a larger asteroid than originally planned, carve out a chunk of it, and then bring it to lunar orbit for an crew of astronauts to visit in an Orion space ship. Garver's proposed change would widen the number of target asteroids and would test technologies important for asteroid mining. But it would also increase the complexity and certainly the cost of the asteroid mission. There are a lot of unanswered questions, such as what kind of mechanism would be involved in taking a piece of an asteroid and moving it? At the same conference Garver had hinted at a willingness to consider mounting a program of "sustainable" lunar exploration, as some in Congress have demanded, concurrent with the asteroid mission."
This is how they seduce us into sending pork to places with senior senators. Never believe NASA when they talk sexy like this, they are just lies to get our panties off.
The first step is probably going to be hunting down mini moons where all the delta-v is provided by gravity. Once the fundamental technologies are in place we can go hunting for bigger fish, but first we have to start with the minnows.
Moving asteroid chunks into Earth orbit.
Given that, to be a threat to Earth, such asteroids would have an orbit that almost intersects Earth's at Earth's position at the near-intersection, and risks being perturbed onto a collision course, I hope they're really careful when "carving off a chunk".
It would be ironic if, in the process of trying to avoid a potential "rifle shot" of the whole asteroid, they perturbed the rest in exactly that way, or broke it up into several large "shotgun pellets" and ended up hitting the Earth with one or more of them when the original would have missed.
It would be a good idea, as well, to be sure the towing orbit of the sample, had no points where (if the tow vehicle lost power or the load broke up) it was on a collision course.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
By some agency, humans will start playing around with asteroids relatively soon (less than 30 years by my guess).
TFA is light on details as to *what* mineral would be mined and how it would all be economically viable. However, this is NASA so we have the joy of not needing it to be taken to market.
Besides advancing science and operational spaceflight, we definitely could use an asteroid program like this to develop a procedure for deflecting/breaking up an asteroid that threatens to hit earth.
I bet somehow you could even get some of Homeland Security's budget...just tell them its to have a procedure to counter terrorists who use a captured asteroid to threaten earth.
Thank you Dave Raggett
When do we get enough technology out of this to play pool with planets?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
about sustainable lunar exploration
An image is worth a thousand word. It's worth more if you've seen the movie to understand my comment, however.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Nonsense
I suddenly have this XKCDesque notion this is actually the start of a RubeGoldbergian scheme to write some esoteric Perl script.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
What the heck is a 'teroid' and did you really have to use profanity to describe how big it is?!
Yes, mining asteroids sounds like a nice plan. But much like flying cars, I do not see it happening any time soon. But fuck, it's great to talk about, isn't it?
Be seeing you...
This seems to be adding a lot of complexity to a proof-of-concept that should start as simply as possible. Just the tech involved in sending a robot and carving up a chunk seems to be putting a lot more variables into the first mining-asteroids effort than is necessary. I don't see the justification for this, unless it's just because someone wants the entire effort to fail (by design), and put an end to the idea entirely.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Note the word..."purchase".
Sure, when someone gets self-sustaining colonies, they will have a need for raw materials but that seems to be decades or hundreds of years away. By then the technology to move people and thngs around in space will have developed further (evidenced by the self-sustaining colonies they will have enabled), so using our tech, today, to do this is both inefficient and far too early.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
NASA has no capable means to reach Lunar orbit let alone return nor will have in the foreseeable 50+ year future! On a meager $16 billion per budget that is decreasing year by year NASA can't even plan+design+build+maintain a new vehicle assembly building for any new rocket! Constellation is pie-in-the-sky foolery program lurching to failure.
NASA is finished. Best to turn it all off and payout the pensions or file for bankruptcy and void the pensions as the switches are being flipped to the off position.
I don't see whatever it is you replied to, so I don't know what the 'nonsense' is that you refer to but it's not at all clear that Eminent Domain has any relevance - before E.D. can be relevant it must be established that a nation has de jure control over space activities (which gets into the question of whether an entity in space is still a 'person' under national law).
I have just returned from a very interesting panel discussion on Saturday afternoon (yesterday as I write this - video should be available on the website soon if not already) at NewSpace 2013 regarding the question of 'ownership' and right of use, mining claims, etc. This is an area of vigorous debate, and it will continue to be for the next 50-100 years. Most of the questions will end up being settled in court rather than in legislation, using rules derived from common and maritime law as much as the law of individual nations.
It's worth noting that the original attempt to control slots in Geostationary Orbit, which created a global monopoly called IntelSat, was eventually (and fortunately) overturned after 20 years of poor use. Now those slots are managed more effectively without government control, by a cooperative and competitive process among players. (IntelSat is now just one of those players, and does a good job.) One of the big risks of space exploitation is the potential for an attempt at a huge governmental central planning bureaucracy, which would almost certainly delay the benefits for decades, and would very likely kill the potential for space exploitation entirely.
If some space exploiters become trillionaires, they will do so in the process of improving the standard of living for the people of Earth, likely by a factor of 10.
What is pretty well established: under the Outer Space Treaty, a nation is responsible for the actions of 'persons' (corporate or natural) of that nation. Each nation is also responsible for any harm to the persons or property of other nations. No nation, and thus no person, may establish ownership of any celestial body, but there is some debate as to what a 'celestial body' entails, howerver the treaty does establish the principle that exploitation of the resources is part of the intent. So at this point some(most?) analysts believe that once you remove part of the body, that part is yours. This follows from 19th century mining law - a miner does not 'own' the mine - the government essentially licenses the miner to remove material, and the material removed becomes the miner's property. A smaller selection believe that once you 'move' a body, it's yours - what 'move' means is up for debate.
But one strong voice on the panel argued that in essence, the Outer Space, Moon and other treaties among Terran nations are de facto, and therefore in the long term de jure, irrelevant and without standing. Just as the American colonists eventually rejected the laws of Britain as applied to the colonies, 'spacers' will eventually if not sooner establish their own rule of law amongst themselves, which will be derived from existing common and natural law, and precedents as they might apply, probably primarily in tort (civil suit)). Her fundamental point was that the nations of Earth do not have, and are not likely to have, any method of enforcing their laws outside of some relatively small region around the planet, and this is as it should be - the laws of space should be based on the experience and needs of those who live and work there (and will be derived from applicable precedent here on Earth, such as maritime law.)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Asimov in one of his novels spoke of sending crews out there , attaching rocket packs and sending chunks of ice to Mars .. ..Imagine a defect somehow in the procedure or .. but a simple accident may cause a great deal of damage if said asteroid was to enter earth's atmosphere .. Claims of infaillible plans have a tendency to send chills up my spine. .. A few fat cats will get richer , but it seems any public money would be better invested in health care , in schools etc before we finance ventures to make the fat a bit fattier.
he may not be all that far from what's to come. But about this , i got a few m hmm , questions
a false manoeuver and it's consequences for. Nice to get an asteroid close
Until we have safeguards in place that assures the asteroid's total destruction in case of need , i wouldn't play God and send asteroids close to earth for any reason . Such scenarios seem to be highly risky and the only ones who would profit from us being all at risk is again the companies.
What's the real benifit for mankind ? . none
I'm only giving better than even odds that we get NASA astronauts back into low Earth orbit again in a NASA spacecraft... forget about anything more dramatic than that. The culture, finances and governance of the United States would need to change significantly for anything more grand than that. A nation that, in its self-inflicted race to champion the lowest common denominator in any endeavour, consumes itself with re-defining its ability to succeed with phases like 'the new normal' is not the kind of nation that can seriously pursue spacefaring.
Science missions fair better if only because there is less public profile to capture both support and (more importantly) opposition.... in those cases the drive to get money to interested congressional districts outweigh the demands of contrary interests for other spending priorities.
So there is a collection of asteroids, whose orbits interact in such a way that they implement a stored-program computer that computes the lifespan of the universe? It would be interesting to see how one might number orbits so that they constitute values in a numeric system. :D Somehow Perl is the perfect tool for this - it's already far out there.
Whooo, this is pretty far out there! Thanks for thinking of it and inspiring some very weird ideas in my head!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I got really excited for a moment after reading the article, before I realized he's talking about this Orion, and not this one.
The trouble with sending a mission (manned or unmanned) to a very small (5 meter class) asteroid in the near future is that we don't know their orbits well enough. At all. Out of 374 very small near Earth asteroids known, exactly 2 have decently determined orbits. The chances of finding a candidate 5 meter asteroid in time to send a mission to it, and having a good enough determination of its orbit to have a mission get to it, is basically nill without a dedicated space telescope such as the B612 Foundations Sentinel mission. So, unless we are willing to wait for an extra 5+ years to build and fly an asteroid finder, that means we have to carve off a piece of a bigger asteroid (more are known, and they tend to have better orbit determinations). As it happens, that is also what the asteroid mining people want NASA to demonstrate, as that fits their view of how asteroid mining will be done, and it will make the asteroid geologists happier as well, so this seems like a win-win all around.
There are currently international treaties in effect that forbid national ownership of some things, like land in Antarctica, bodies of water more than a certain distance from claimed land and celestial bodies. "civillians" only own land as allowed by those governments or by rebellion against them. Any concept of "Common Heritage" is only supportable as long as competing nations agree to do so.
Sounds like a stealthy way of killing off the project, by piling on requirements until it's obviously too expensive or risky.
Moon seems does not have much.
Why we are so sure asteroids do?
I read somewhere all "heavy metal" stuff is mostly in Mercury/Venus/Earth zone, the further away, the lighter the "metals".
Are we so desperate for chondrite and iron?
Asimov in one of his novels spoke of sending crews out there, attaching rocket packs and sending chunks of ice to Mars ..
Yeah, but he didn't know about the reactor.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
This is already being done by ex nasa (among many others) engineers, no? Nice work captain copycat.
We had several flying cars back in the days of black-and-white TV and somebody designs and builds a new version every few years... but most companies run out of money before they can clear all the FAA regulatory hurdles, and then they learn that the market is not there. This is doubly-sad because each generation of flying cars has been so much better than the preceding generation (all that cash that's been dumped into these dreams has had good results, but no customers and no visibility). The market's not there because the FAA makes the hurdle so high to get and keep a pilot's license that most people never even try to get one, and many of those who spend the massive pile of cash and time required soon learn a harsh lesson: The FAA will take it away from you in a heartbeat if you have any medical condition arise (which most people eventually do) or any number of incidents that may not have even injured anybody or damaged any property (leaving you with an expensive flying vehicle you must sell into a market with too few buyers). Nearly every person I know who got a pilot's license eventually had it jerked by the FAA for medical reasons (reasons that did NOT cost them their license to drive cars where they could just as easily kill other people...)
If FAA rules were applied to cars, most people would never drive a car and auto markets would be so small most cars would be too expensive for most people.
NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver is a member of the Diseased tissue at NASA and must be surgically removed for the patient to survive.
Her death will be welcomed by many at the NASA center across the U.S.A. The U.S.A. which Garver hates.
... of the dark meat
I think Halle Berry certainly qualifies.
The key comment is for the Orion spacecraft to visit the chunk. The pork-mongers in Houston are building the SLS which has been called the "rocket to nowhere" with no mission in mind. Here is a perfect, though far-fetched, justification of this pork. Pork is not so bad except for the fact they it steals money for the real science being done at JPL with this unmanned probes. NASA should split so that Houston will quit stealing money from JPL.
If they want to pay for this mission why not just take pre-orders for pieces of any rock brought back? What's a meteorite go for these days? What's a piece of history worth to a world of collectors?
Why we are so sure asteroids do?
You're right. We should probably first send out, oh I don't know, say a robot mission to bring a small asteroid (or a sample from a larger one) back close enough for us to be able to run lots of checks. Hell we could even combine it with the manned program in order to gain some relatively safe but challenging experience doing work beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years; two birds with one stone, so to speak.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
"before E.D. can be relevant it...
It'll be hard. I hear that they're facing stiff competition, and have been likely to flip-flop when under pressure...
I wonder what the effects are to bringing heavy material back to Earth. My first guess is that it will begin to slow the rotation and have other unforeseen effects on the wobble. I'm surprised that environmentalists aren't freaking out over the thought that this could have a far more immediate impact than their climate change worries.
Paying off the war / security state / spying / NSA debts while keeping tax cuts for the 10% who benefited from them is not going to happen, so, you are dead right. Capitalism fails again to address the FUTURE needs of man.
There is no "tomorrow" in a P&L statement.