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NASA Offering Contracts To Encourage Asteroid Mining
An anonymous reader writes "Two private companies, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, have received contracts from NASA to study asteroid redirection and will pursue their plans of asteroid mining. From the article: "Deep Space Industries is planning to build a number of dense spacecrafts called FireFlies, and they plan on sending the satellites on one way missions to gather information about the density, shape, composition and size of an asteroid. They also have plans to build a spacecraft called Dragonfly, which has the purpose of catching asteroids. The asteroid material will be collected and returned to Earth by 'Harvesters'. Planetary Resources, on the other hand, plans to build a number of middle sized and small telescopes that will be capable of examining asteroids near the planet Earth for economic potential. They already have the telescopes Arkyd 300, Arkyd 200 and the Arkyd 100, each having its own specific systems."
The pebbles don't have a substantial gravity wells to escape. With asteroids you can use minimal thrust and exploit orbital dynamics to hit earth's atmosphere and fall in.
Not to mention it's a little easier to target specific ones that have the elements you're interested in. At first that's going to be low-reactive(i.e. easy to extract) rare metals like gold and platinum.
Thank you!
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Just remember I told you so when Elon Musk is holding the Earth for a ransom of one MILLION dollars or he'll smack us with an asteroid.
Also, could one of these new asteroid mining companies get whatever's left of Atari to sponsor them so they can fly under the Atari logo?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Science fiction authors have totally solved this problem a zillion different ways. They all share certain features. First you go to the asteroid. Second, you set up some sort of mass driver on the asteroid or ion driver, ideally one that uses solar electricity or heat and not imported fuel, but if you don't mind a bit of radioactivity, propulsion by nuke is OK (Orion).
Depends on the mass of the asteroid as well, and how long you want to wait to get it home, and how much of it you want to have left when you get there. If you don't mind waiting a VERY long time, you could even use an angled light sail for propulsion. Third, you drive it home, or rather, have your fully automated computer tools do it for you. Fourth, you get it into Earth Orbit and then use it to threaten the hegemony running Earth, insisting that they send you dancing girls and exotic foods or you'll drop it on their heads -- it makes you way more money than actually selling the metal.
Optionally, you can have your robots smelt the asteroid in place first, using large mirrors to concentrate solar energy to melt the asteroid rock into slag plus metal, perhaps even collecting the slag (with a thin metal coating) to use in your linear accelerator or solar heated rocket as reaction mass. Some asteroids are really comet heads and might be covered with solid gases and ice and might support making real fuel on the spot as well. And fusion would no doubt shift the plan a bit as well.
But the final stage is always to drop them on Earth, not use them for good. Otherwise there isn't any real plot. Sometimes they don't even bother dropping them per se, they just fall by accident. But nobody can resist an umpty teraton-of-TNT explosion: not invading space aliens, not Dr. Evil, not the asteroid mining company's board of directors, not even the grizzled old asteroid miner whose sainted mother was put out onto the street to starve during the housing riots of 2057.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The goal isn't to bring the resources back to Earth.
Sure a astroid made out of solid gold might surpass the break even point at current prices you'd only have to bring back more than 50 pounds of gold per million dollars spent to break even. But there are also diminishing returns, too much new gold and the price will crash.
Water and plutonium, which is what the article says they are focusing on, are worth far less than gold.
Having water and plutonium already in orbit means missions can be designed to use those resources without the ramifications that arise from transporting them out of Earth's gravity well.
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