As another poster pointed out, there are good reasons not to take humans along. Could save you bundles of cost and time.
However, the term "viable" in my mind is really two things.
First, is it technically possible? Do the physics work and do we have the necessary engineering expertise to make such an effort work. I think the answer to the first question is "not yet" but we are closer to the end of the task than the start. It is clearly within our reach to accomplish, we just are not quite there yet.
The second thing "viable" means is can somebody make a business out of this? The answer to this is *clearly* "no". Right now we have absolutely no business case we can make that says, we can go get something from an asteroid more cheaply than we can get the material from earth. Without at least a plausible business plan, nobody will pony up the tens of billions to invest in this. Even with a plan, with missions lasting 3-5 years and development times doubling that, it will be a hard sell for that much investment when you are looking at nearly 10 years before a profit can be turned.
My best guess is that there will be no business plan that makes sense until we start needing significant quantities materials in orbit and the cost of lifting them from the earth surface is significant enough to make it worth fetching them. But I don't see any mass development of space within my lifetime (say another 50 years) where we will need enough of anything to make this an economic choice. At least at the rate we are going. The International Space Station is trying to eek out staying up until 2028 (15 more years) and we don't yet have a replacement on the drawing board. I don't see a mass colonization of space, the moon, Mars or anyplace else happening anytime soon.
Commercially this is just NOT going to happen... Technically? We are just about there...
The reasons for not using nuclear power in space are political, not technological.
... Sufficient shielding for even the crew and work areas for a reactor that can produce enough energy to smelt metals won't be light...
Umm. What crew and work areas?
Asteroid mining is going to be done by robots, or it won't be done at all. The enormous cost difference between putting a robot probe in space vs putting a man who is pretty much dead weight is well known. A robot can operate for a decade unattended (Opportunity, still operating on Mars, will hit this mark in three weeks time). Asteroid mining is tailor-made for robots who have no use for a stinking atmosphere or gravity.
Point taken, but you are talking about extremely advanced technology now that we don't yet have, and even if you don't take a crew you have to take shielding along for the electronics. Perhaps not as much, but you will still need some.
The Mars Exploration Rovers cost about a billion dollars and was a ONE WAY mission. So is Mars Science Lab which cost 2.5 Billion and will not return anything but radio waves to the earth. Apollo was the only set of missions that actually returned significant amounts of anything (838.2 Lbs of rocks), and they where manned running about 25 Billion and three deaths (in 1960-70 dollars) for six trips. The content of the Moon Rocks was certainly not anything you could sell commercially, at least not for anything approaching what it cost to obtain them.
Development costs for the technology you suggest would be in the billions, (Tens of Billions likely) which is a lot of up front risk for any commercial enterprise, and totally impossible when your business plan doesn't yet have a product to sell that produces a profit. Nobody is going to dump tens of billions of dollars into "mining space rocks" until there is conclusive evidence it might be possible and it would produce some product worth more than what it costs to obtain.
So my reasoning is sound, this isn't politics, it's other things that prevent this from happening.
1% more fuel in orbit, equates to a LOT more weight at launch. 1 lb of fuel in orbit, costs many hundreds launch weight. Sure, when you achieve low orbit, most of the work is done, but having to carry 1% more weight in fuel is a substantial price to pay when you figure what it costs in launch weight. Then figure that production of the vehicle and fuel plus the emissions from the launch will have a very significant environmental impact and you have my point.
Making this all return a profit will mean we will have to do things on a really big scale, especially given that the initial up-front investment required to just get the equipment into orbit is so high, unless of course, somebody comes up with *something* we need that simply cannot be manufactured on earth but is freely obtainable from some asteroids way up there someplace. I'm darned to come up with much we cannot synthesize here if we really wanted too, so I find it unlikely that this mining asteroids idea will take off. Unless of course you come up with the "fountain of youth" or some such on a local asteroid, in which case folks will pay though the nose for it (until the drug patent runs out and the generic manufacturers take over. )
The reasons for not using nuclear power in space are political, not technological.
I wouldn't say that, the reasons are environmental and economic, with political coming up last on the list.
But don't downplay the technical issues either. Sufficient shielding for even the crew and work areas for a reactor that can produce enough energy to smelt metals won't be light. TOPAZ-2 was about 1,000 Lbs for 2 Kw of power and was NOT built for flying next to humans. Getting a pound of mass out of earth orbit is an expensive thing to do in terms of pounds of fuel needed and the vehicle to launch it all upwards. ROI is going to be a pain, given the huge up front costs.
For smelting metals, I'd figure some mirrors would be more efficient than solar panels. Let's you do away with the inefficiencies of converting light into electricity and then into heat. I'm guessing that mirrors would be lighter too.
I That said, why not fusion - Voyager was powered by a little plutonium, so its not like we can't send the required materials up there.
Oh yea, that's a great idea. Let's put a nuke power plant into space. Do you know how much these things weigh when you add the necessary shielding so that humans can approach the thing? You don't have to shield the whole thing, like here on earth, but it's still going to be a lot of mass.
BTW, Voyager 1 &2 are powered using HEAT which is produced by radioactive decay, which is really not fusion in the chain reaction sense.
. (And then there's the environmental advantage of mining asteroids over terrestrial mining.)
What, pray tell, might the advantage be? I dare say that creating a rocket and fuel to launch tones of stuff far enough into space to reach an asteroid is going to be pretty rough on the local environment. Then add the ability to return at least some recovered mass and I'm thinking we are nowhere near an environmental wash for quite some time.
We tried, but he's suck in the ice down south again and the satellite phone is on the fritz. We will air drop a message on the next health and welfare check, but unless he knows how to send smoke signals, we won't know if he got the message.
I lived in southern Indiana in 1994 when it dropped to -30F. It's going to be -10 this time.
So yes, I'm under 40 and I've seen it before.
Me too... I was driving across Indiana during this time in my old 64 VW Bug. I had every bit of clothing on I could manage and even with the heat blowing full blast I had to stop every hour or so to warm up. Oh the fond memories...
Lived though the -20F (Ambient, not wind chill, high for the day) just west of ORD, working on Grandpa's car in the garage with the door open in the late 80's. Had to take the tools into the house for 40 min ever hour so they wouldn't stick to your hands. I still remember the 1/2 inch of ice on the INSIDE of the windows that winter. THAT was cold.
This is also how analog computers work. They're extremely fast and efficient, but imprecise. It had a bit of traction in the old days, but interest seems to have died off.
Analog is not imprecise. Analog computing can be very precise and very fast for complex transfer functions. The problem with Analog is that it is hard to change the output function easily and it is subject to changes in the derived output caused from things like temperature changes or induced noise. So the issue is not about precision.
But it's ultimately impossible to build a computer that calculates with arbitrary precision.
Excuse me but not quite, assuming you don't mean absolute precision, we already use multiple precision calculations based on need, speed or memory foot print. We have multiple sizes of floating point number representations as well as integers of varying sizes. Plus, there is nothing that prevents you from doing X-Bit floating point number calculations if you wanted.
Keeping CNG compressors and storage *outside* the house is a good idea. If I finally get the time, money and inclination all at the same time to do this, I will certainly make every effort to stay safe. With CNG stations in my local area, I may not have to bother refueling at home though. All I need to do is do a Bi-Fuel conversion and I can enjoy the cost savings when I can, or just burn gas when I cannot make it to the station to buy CNG. Right now, there are 4 CNG stations with 15 miles of my home, so if I get one of the Ford F-150's with a large CNG tank, I'd likely only have to refuel once a month anyway.
I agree with you up to then, but beware anything T Boon Pickens says. He is only saying it because he found a way for it to make him money.
Certainly that is his intent, the problem here is that he has lost a large fortune betting on NG. With fracking increasing the supply of NG way beyond anybody's expectations, prices have fallen with Mr. Pickens heavily invested. So he actually *didn't* find a way to make any money, he lost a bit.
Not that it matters to me if he made billions on his NG bets. I don't have a beef with anybody making money, as long as they do it ethically and legally. T Boon Pikens doesn't strike me as a criminal sort, just a lucky Texas Oil man with money to invest.
Distribution infrastructure already exists in most of the nation was my point. I understand that stations catering to NG refueling don't exist in most places. But the distribution network for NG is almost everywhere. Going from the pipe in the street, you buy a compressor or two, a storage tank and the equivalent of a fuel pump and you are in the business of selling CNG.
Personally, I'd LOVE to have a NG powered car. I have NG service so I could easily put a compressor in my garage and refuel overnight. Compressors are about the same price as a fast charger for your electric car and are commercially available. Honda sells a NG Civic that is dual fueled. You loose the trunk and part of the fuel tank but I could run NG for my 1.5 hours a day I spend on the road at a much lower cost than gasoline and run the fuel available on road trips.
Your F-150 example is a good one too. Much more room for the CNG tank in the truck bed, so you could get a LOT of distance out of it. Being dual fueled would make a lot of sense, while the refueling infrastructure was built out. Just remember, unlike some other common "dream" ideas, this change in fuel comes with a distribution system already in place.
This NEVER made sense environmentally, economically or technically.
Technically, we hit the "blend wall" at about 10%. Above that amount, gasoline engines start to have issues with Ethanol. Rubber seals, hoses and plastic parts in fuel systems start having reduced lifespan. Above 10% some engines start having other internal issues. Gas mileage is reduced because Ethanol has a lower energy density. Ethanol is a water magnet, it mixes with water easily and is hard to keep "dry" so rusting and corrosion becomes more common in fuel systems.
Environmentally, the production of ethanol doesn't really reduce emissions of C02 when you count the whole process of growing, harvesting, storing, transporting, processing into ethanol, transporting, blending and transporting the product again. It was at best a wash. Then when you consider how much more fertilizer, pesticides and tilling add to the environmental impact it clearly becomes a negative.
Economically, the case is even worse. The whole process of producing ethanol is both labor and capital expensive. It is obviously more expensive as a motor fuel. Then when you consider what has happened to food prices as corn (a base part of much of what we eat as well as feed for animals we use for food) prices have gone up.
But what about or dependance on foreign Oil imports? It helped, but was it worth it? T Boon Pickens has the answer to that. He thinks that we are stupid to convert food into fuel when we could be using abundant Natural Gas for a motor fuel. Converting gasoline engines to use natural gas is not that hard (albeit harder than 10% Ethanol) it works great with reduced range due to energy density. Refueling times can be comparable to gasoline and a large distribution network already exists in much of the nation.
Have you priced E-Text books lately? Maybe it's because I'm looking at college level stuff, but they get a LOT of money just to let you use their book for 6 months and a whole lot more to get the book forever. I just don't see that happening until the publishers back off the rental prices.
Slashdot Mirror
So Dennis Rader, is that you? No, Charles Manson then?
Problem solved!
As another poster pointed out, there are good reasons not to take humans along. Could save you bundles of cost and time.
However, the term "viable" in my mind is really two things.
First, is it technically possible? Do the physics work and do we have the necessary engineering expertise to make such an effort work. I think the answer to the first question is "not yet" but we are closer to the end of the task than the start. It is clearly within our reach to accomplish, we just are not quite there yet.
The second thing "viable" means is can somebody make a business out of this? The answer to this is *clearly* "no". Right now we have absolutely no business case we can make that says, we can go get something from an asteroid more cheaply than we can get the material from earth. Without at least a plausible business plan, nobody will pony up the tens of billions to invest in this. Even with a plan, with missions lasting 3-5 years and development times doubling that, it will be a hard sell for that much investment when you are looking at nearly 10 years before a profit can be turned.
My best guess is that there will be no business plan that makes sense until we start needing significant quantities materials in orbit and the cost of lifting them from the earth surface is significant enough to make it worth fetching them. But I don't see any mass development of space within my lifetime (say another 50 years) where we will need enough of anything to make this an economic choice. At least at the rate we are going. The International Space Station is trying to eek out staying up until 2028 (15 more years) and we don't yet have a replacement on the drawing board. I don't see a mass colonization of space, the moon, Mars or anyplace else happening anytime soon.
Commercially this is just NOT going to happen... Technically? We are just about there...
The reasons for not using nuclear power in space are political, not technological.
... Sufficient shielding for even the crew and work areas for a reactor that can produce enough energy to smelt metals won't be light...
Umm. What crew and work areas?
Asteroid mining is going to be done by robots, or it won't be done at all. The enormous cost difference between putting a robot probe in space vs putting a man who is pretty much dead weight is well known. A robot can operate for a decade unattended (Opportunity, still operating on Mars, will hit this mark in three weeks time). Asteroid mining is tailor-made for robots who have no use for a stinking atmosphere or gravity.
Point taken, but you are talking about extremely advanced technology now that we don't yet have, and even if you don't take a crew you have to take shielding along for the electronics. Perhaps not as much, but you will still need some.
The Mars Exploration Rovers cost about a billion dollars and was a ONE WAY mission. So is Mars Science Lab which cost 2.5 Billion and will not return anything but radio waves to the earth. Apollo was the only set of missions that actually returned significant amounts of anything (838.2 Lbs of rocks), and they where manned running about 25 Billion and three deaths (in 1960-70 dollars) for six trips. The content of the Moon Rocks was certainly not anything you could sell commercially, at least not for anything approaching what it cost to obtain them.
Development costs for the technology you suggest would be in the billions, (Tens of Billions likely) which is a lot of up front risk for any commercial enterprise, and totally impossible when your business plan doesn't yet have a product to sell that produces a profit. Nobody is going to dump tens of billions of dollars into "mining space rocks" until there is conclusive evidence it might be possible and it would produce some product worth more than what it costs to obtain.
So my reasoning is sound, this isn't politics, it's other things that prevent this from happening.
1% more fuel in orbit, equates to a LOT more weight at launch. 1 lb of fuel in orbit, costs many hundreds launch weight. Sure, when you achieve low orbit, most of the work is done, but having to carry 1% more weight in fuel is a substantial price to pay when you figure what it costs in launch weight. Then figure that production of the vehicle and fuel plus the emissions from the launch will have a very significant environmental impact and you have my point.
Making this all return a profit will mean we will have to do things on a really big scale, especially given that the initial up-front investment required to just get the equipment into orbit is so high, unless of course, somebody comes up with *something* we need that simply cannot be manufactured on earth but is freely obtainable from some asteroids way up there someplace. I'm darned to come up with much we cannot synthesize here if we really wanted too, so I find it unlikely that this mining asteroids idea will take off. Unless of course you come up with the "fountain of youth" or some such on a local asteroid, in which case folks will pay though the nose for it (until the drug patent runs out and the generic manufacturers take over. )
The reasons for not using nuclear power in space are political, not technological.
I wouldn't say that, the reasons are environmental and economic, with political coming up last on the list.
But don't downplay the technical issues either. Sufficient shielding for even the crew and work areas for a reactor that can produce enough energy to smelt metals won't be light. TOPAZ-2 was about 1,000 Lbs for 2 Kw of power and was NOT built for flying next to humans. Getting a pound of mass out of earth orbit is an expensive thing to do in terms of pounds of fuel needed and the vehicle to launch it all upwards. ROI is going to be a pain, given the huge up front costs.
For smelting metals, I'd figure some mirrors would be more efficient than solar panels. Let's you do away with the inefficiencies of converting light into electricity and then into heat. I'm guessing that mirrors would be lighter too.
I That said, why not fusion - Voyager was powered by a little plutonium, so its not like we can't send the required materials up there.
Oh yea, that's a great idea. Let's put a nuke power plant into space. Do you know how much these things weigh when you add the necessary shielding so that humans can approach the thing? You don't have to shield the whole thing, like here on earth, but it's still going to be a lot of mass.
BTW, Voyager 1 &2 are powered using HEAT which is produced by radioactive decay, which is really not fusion in the chain reaction sense.
Somebody has to make the 10 asteroids first?
Oh for MOD points! LOL..
I think you hit the problem square on. There is a LARGE chance that mining asteroids will never be viable.
. (And then there's the environmental advantage of mining asteroids over terrestrial mining.)
What, pray tell, might the advantage be? I dare say that creating a rocket and fuel to launch tones of stuff far enough into space to reach an asteroid is going to be pretty rough on the local environment. Then add the ability to return at least some recovered mass and I'm thinking we are nowhere near an environmental wash for quite some time.
Anyone tell Al Gore about this?
We tried, but he's suck in the ice down south again and the satellite phone is on the fritz. We will air drop a message on the next health and welfare check, but unless he knows how to send smoke signals, we won't know if he got the message.
Got to go plant a few thousand trees now...
It means the volcano went off and killed the submitter before he finished typing, and the same thing happened to the slashdot "editor."
So.. Who/what hit the submit button then?
I lived in southern Indiana in 1994 when it dropped to -30F. It's going to be -10 this time.
So yes, I'm under 40 and I've seen it before.
Me too... I was driving across Indiana during this time in my old 64 VW Bug. I had every bit of clothing on I could manage and even with the heat blowing full blast I had to stop every hour or so to warm up. Oh the fond memories...
Lived though the -20F (Ambient, not wind chill, high for the day) just west of ORD, working on Grandpa's car in the garage with the door open in the late 80's. Had to take the tools into the house for 40 min ever hour so they wouldn't stick to your hands. I still remember the 1/2 inch of ice on the INSIDE of the windows that winter. THAT was cold.
Just run in the background a "Random Noise Generator"
And what program do you propose to use that generates Random Noise?
I think he means Megahertz as in 100 Mhz, which is in the FM broadcast band.
This is also how analog computers work. They're extremely fast and efficient, but imprecise. It had a bit of traction in the old days, but interest seems to have died off.
Analog is not imprecise. Analog computing can be very precise and very fast for complex transfer functions. The problem with Analog is that it is hard to change the output function easily and it is subject to changes in the derived output caused from things like temperature changes or induced noise. So the issue is not about precision.
But it's ultimately impossible to build a computer that calculates with arbitrary precision.
Excuse me but not quite, assuming you don't mean absolute precision, we already use multiple precision calculations based on need, speed or memory foot print. We have multiple sizes of floating point number representations as well as integers of varying sizes. Plus, there is nothing that prevents you from doing X-Bit floating point number calculations if you wanted.
Keeping CNG compressors and storage *outside* the house is a good idea. If I finally get the time, money and inclination all at the same time to do this, I will certainly make every effort to stay safe. With CNG stations in my local area, I may not have to bother refueling at home though. All I need to do is do a Bi-Fuel conversion and I can enjoy the cost savings when I can, or just burn gas when I cannot make it to the station to buy CNG. Right now, there are 4 CNG stations with 15 miles of my home, so if I get one of the Ford F-150's with a large CNG tank, I'd likely only have to refuel once a month anyway.
T Boon Pickens has the answer to that.
I agree with you up to then, but beware anything T Boon Pickens says. He is only saying it because he found a way for it to make him money.
Certainly that is his intent, the problem here is that he has lost a large fortune betting on NG. With fracking increasing the supply of NG way beyond anybody's expectations, prices have fallen with Mr. Pickens heavily invested. So he actually *didn't* find a way to make any money, he lost a bit.
Not that it matters to me if he made billions on his NG bets. I don't have a beef with anybody making money, as long as they do it ethically and legally. T Boon Pikens doesn't strike me as a criminal sort, just a lucky Texas Oil man with money to invest.
I just found this.. There are over 600 existing stations serving CNG customers already.
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/natural_gas_locations.html
They are not everywhere, but they sure are where I'm accustom to going.
Distribution infrastructure already exists in most of the nation was my point. I understand that stations catering to NG refueling don't exist in most places. But the distribution network for NG is almost everywhere. Going from the pipe in the street, you buy a compressor or two, a storage tank and the equivalent of a fuel pump and you are in the business of selling CNG.
Personally, I'd LOVE to have a NG powered car. I have NG service so I could easily put a compressor in my garage and refuel overnight. Compressors are about the same price as a fast charger for your electric car and are commercially available. Honda sells a NG Civic that is dual fueled. You loose the trunk and part of the fuel tank but I could run NG for my 1.5 hours a day I spend on the road at a much lower cost than gasoline and run the fuel available on road trips.
Your F-150 example is a good one too. Much more room for the CNG tank in the truck bed, so you could get a LOT of distance out of it. Being dual fueled would make a lot of sense, while the refueling infrastructure was built out. Just remember, unlike some other common "dream" ideas, this change in fuel comes with a distribution system already in place.
My healthcare BSOD...
But if you like your Dr Watson trace... You can keep it.
This NEVER made sense environmentally, economically or technically.
Technically, we hit the "blend wall" at about 10%. Above that amount, gasoline engines start to have issues with Ethanol. Rubber seals, hoses and plastic parts in fuel systems start having reduced lifespan. Above 10% some engines start having other internal issues. Gas mileage is reduced because Ethanol has a lower energy density. Ethanol is a water magnet, it mixes with water easily and is hard to keep "dry" so rusting and corrosion becomes more common in fuel systems.
Environmentally, the production of ethanol doesn't really reduce emissions of C02 when you count the whole process of growing, harvesting, storing, transporting, processing into ethanol, transporting, blending and transporting the product again. It was at best a wash. Then when you consider how much more fertilizer, pesticides and tilling add to the environmental impact it clearly becomes a negative.
Economically, the case is even worse. The whole process of producing ethanol is both labor and capital expensive. It is obviously more expensive as a motor fuel. Then when you consider what has happened to food prices as corn (a base part of much of what we eat as well as feed for animals we use for food) prices have gone up.
But what about or dependance on foreign Oil imports? It helped, but was it worth it? T Boon Pickens has the answer to that. He thinks that we are stupid to convert food into fuel when we could be using abundant Natural Gas for a motor fuel. Converting gasoline engines to use natural gas is not that hard (albeit harder than 10% Ethanol) it works great with reduced range due to energy density. Refueling times can be comparable to gasoline and a large distribution network already exists in much of the nation.
It's time. Do away with this mistake.
Have you priced E-Text books lately? Maybe it's because I'm looking at college level stuff, but they get a LOT of money just to let you use their book for 6 months and a whole lot more to get the book forever. I just don't see that happening until the publishers back off the rental prices.
Even in the dead of winter? Dude, you have a problem..