On Asteroid Mining 231
There's an article out in Feed Magazine that pans the Space Station, but then gets into some actually interesting matter, like the increasing ability to actually do asteroid mining. Asteroid mining has long been a staple of hard science fiction, but the benefits of being able to /really/ do it are immense - less pollution, really clean metals. There's just that nasty get-the-material to the factory issue. But that's why we need a space elevator, right?
On a similar note (Score:1)
Apropos, asteroids. (Score:1)
"What's wrong?" asked his friend, "the band was no good?"
"The band was very good," he answered.
"The food was no good?" asked his friend.
"Out of this world!"
"Nu! So, what was the problem?" asked his friend.
"There was no atmosphere."
Naw, just drop it... (Score:1)
Why be so delicate? It's metal for crying out loud. Make ingots, encase them in an ablative silicon heat shield (so you don't loose your valuable iron to ablation) and go "ready, aim, fire...". Pick a spot - Arizona in the desert - paint a 20 mile X and have trucks waiting. :)
Mike
Re:strange notions of investment (Score:1)
Re:space escalator... (Score:1)
Starship (Score:1)
Cool, we're that much closer to building the Enterprise in spacedock... Only without the shields... and the impulse drive... and the warp drive... and the teleporters... and the photon torpedos... and the aliens...
a space elevator? (Score:1)
Entropy (Score:1)
Well, yes it might but the second law of thermodynamics tends to interfere. All that platinum that is gathered in one place tends to be used all over the Earth. While we should gather it in to reuse some of it will disappear. Eventually we end up with materials uniformly spread everywhere, and it becomes impossible to resuse them.
The Spanish in the "New World" (Score:1)
The guys who really made the big bucks were the ones who decided to move to the New World and create wealth there.
Actually, the riches (it was mainly silver from Mexico and Peru) that weren't sunk or pirated passed frequently from the Spanish galleons to the convoys that brought them to the very wealthy German banker family Fugger. The king had mortgaged his share well in advance to wage wars all over Europe.
I wouldn't say that the English colonies were very rich before independence. Plantation economy and industrialization made them rich but I'm not an expert.
__
Ownership (Score:2)
How do define ownership? People, or rather NASA, seems to think that space is theirs. Sooner or later people will get out there. And then what? Have someone decide that they own Mars, or that asteroid, or anything.
This article talks about making/saving money up there, but that alone opens the door to tremendous conflict over ownership
Re:Ownership (Score:2)
Maybe in between countries. Inside of a country, however, you allow the government to help with laws and the like so people don't have to weild guns. Besides, in those countries where civilians may not own firearms, would they have to renounce citizenship before defending their land?
Re:Ownership (Score:2)
So the first person to land on Mars owns all of it? Must he put up a planetary defense system to keep it? Or must you defend every inch? Will some group be set up as arbitrator? Or will Anarchy be the defining factor?
Re:Ownership (Score:2)
They aren't taking anything away from you.
If space mining becomes a common theme, then they are. And the vast amounts of space take a lot of time to get to, until we find significantly better ways to travel.
Remember the Spanish in the "New World"? (Score:2)
The guys who really made the big bucks were the ones who decided to move to the New World and create wealth there. The result was a little experiment called "The United States of America." I've heard some rumors it turned out to be a good investment.
The asteriods will produce a new Iron Age as soon as we discover a source of air and water out there. Ice asteroids, anyone? How about the rings of Saturn? (Sure they're a long way out there, but that's a lot of ice.)
Another fact many people don't recognize is that there are three asteroid belts. These appear to be the result of perturbations in the asteroid orbits caused by Jupiter over the millennia.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:2)
United Space Mine Workers Union Local #6 (Score:2)
Re:strange notions of investment (Score:2)
Jon Acheson
Lessons from Homeworld (Score:2)
I never let my resource collectors go out alone.
Usually, I'd build two collectors, and one controller. I'd have the controller guard the collectors, but since it doesn't have guns, it just followed them.
I'd also usually build a few multi-gun corvettes to guard the resource controller.
I mean, sure, our asteroid belt seems pretty empty now because we don't see anything on radar. But we haven't built the long-range sensor platform yet either.
Just something to think about.
Re:China To Mine The Moon (Score:2)
Do you think that closed mining is more proper to use on the Moon? I don't think so. First due to the nature of the rock, second because there is no need to dig it when you may use a pair of nukes to fragment rock, third because this world does not have atmosphere and low gravity. On such environment, dust takes longer to settle down and spreads much larger. Besides fragments of rocks will be flying upon, more frequently, than this would happen on Earth.
And why to spend so much work if nukes can be reliably used there? Note that, due to several reasons, they can be used in a fraction of power needed on Earth. Second they can only be used effectively on subsoil. Third radiation would not be so widespread due to the lack of gaseous or liquid components on Moon surface.
So closed mining would be not only less economical but also more dangerous.
However open mining is also not without dangers. In a near time some places can get heavy on dust that gets harder and harder to settle.
Re:China To Mine The Moon (Score:2)
Besides, in cases when a powerful sun storm comes up, it would be easier to take cover on the other side of an asteroid. On the Moon there will be the need to dig up bunkers and this may not be so simple on the basaltic surface of this planet.
Re:What about the MOon? (Score:2)
A lot of people would love to be able to use moon rocks to build things like giant space stations--even the idea of the O'Neill space colony proposed some years ago.
In short, why go way out there to capture an asteroid when there's this great mineral resource just over quarter-million miles away?
Overpopulation is not a problem (Score:2)
Once people have enough, they stop having so many kids and they just lay back and enjoy life.
Once the developing nations hit that point, their population growth will dwindle to nothing too, and everything will calm down.
Of course, we need to worry about the fact that your average first world person consumes a massive amount of resources, but we're working on that one.
_____
Re:always the same (Score:2)
BTW, not all asteroids are in the asteroid belt. Some -- including some potentially very useful ones -- are much closer.
Re:Ownership (Score:2)
Same as always.
Re:That's Smart. . . but not the ONLY Advantage. . (Score:2)
Re:Earth mass (Score:2)
sure, it's effected our orbit over the last few billion years, but not in a significant way, as compared to the total mass of the earth, this, too, is inconsequential.
so, mine your asteroids. bring the raw materials here. if we get too overweight, by that point we'll have the facilities to ship some of our surplus biomass off-planet to compensate
Re:always the same (Score:2)
Extraction costs could come down a lot - you don't have to be picky about disposal of waste. What you don't want, you leave right there. There's a massive savings right off the bat - let's have a stab in the dark and say about 50%.
Distance is not a great factor. A small delta-V means you get the materials into Earth orbit in a couple of years. Heck, equip the refinery with an ion drive and refine your reaction mass from the asteroid. Constant small force over long time = very large delta-V.
Yes, to make economic gains from asteroid mining, you can't be in the "Get Rich Quick" category. You have to be patient, and willing to pay large up front costs (research, development and launch). The payoff will be cheaper in-orbit materials, cleaner to-surface materials, and much less pollution on the Earth.
The longer you're willing to wait for processed materials to arrive in Earth orbit, the cheaper it becomes to ship them from the NEO, or even "Asteroid Belt" orbit.
The most expensive part of asteroid mining will be developing the robotic asteroid mine. Compared to research and development of this device, launch costs will be negligible. If we can power these things off "dirty" ion-drive fuel (say, iron, nickel or silicon) then we don't have to worry about refueling them.
There are huge economic gains to be made from asteroid mining. The hardest part is the first step.
China To Mine The Moon (Score:2)
The Moon has more gravity than an asteroid and fewer heavy metals, but it's much more convenient to reach. And it's a lot easier to launch from the Moon than from Earth.
Hmmm... (Score:2)
Methinks perhaps Hemos has been playing just a wee bit too much Alpha Centauri...
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Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Re:strange notions of investment (Score:2)
'. . I miss the days when space exploration didn't have to pay for itself . .
And yet, the space program was the only real customer for shrinking the size computers down. It is because of the computing power requirement of Apollo that we all have desktop PCs (with several times the computing power of the Apollo computers.)
When the government invests in science projects, the downstream rewards are difficult to imagine but more than pay for the original investment.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:2)
That doesn't sound so easy to me.
You've got to ferry the mass driver system out there or else build it in place. Don't forget conservation of momentum -- if you're mining a significant portion of the asteriod's mass you're going to make your job lots harder. Then you have to build a system to intercept the material when it nears earth, either in many small and hard to find packets or in large and dangerous chunks. That system will have to match the material's velocity to Earth and then ferry it down.
Building such a system for a massive and inexpensive commodity like iron or nickel doesn't make any sense at all.
Look -- silica has an ecomic value; you can go to the hardware store and pay good dollars for sand for your sandbox or to mix with cement to make concrete. Somebody is making their living quarrying sand as we speak. If you went by current market prices the Sahara probably has billions of dollars worth of sand. The reason entrepreneurs aren't shipping sand from the Sahara is that you can quarry sand locally a lot cheaper than the cost of transport from North Africa. Not to mention if you shipped a few millions of tons of sand from the Sahara the price of sand would collapse.
This is the logic by which the guy concludes that there are trillions of dollars worth of iron and nickel on this asteroid.
If you go out there, it has to be for things that whose value to weight is high, like iridium. The commodity that fits this bill best is -- knowlege.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:2)
I think it might make sense if you had a project that required huge quantities of iron in orbit -- say building a habitat to support hundreds of thousands of people
Re:Yes, you are... (Score:2)
Hmmm. So I was only about an order of magnitude off -- not bad for a sheer guess. Consider though. Have you ever been to a mine like some of the huge copper mines they have in Chile?
Imagine having to launch the space equivalent of one of these [komatsucrushers.com]. Curb weight -- 126,000 pounds. Even at $1000 per pound, you're talking $126 million dollars just to get this into orbit, much less to where you're going to need it. And a major mining operation would crawl with things like this -- only they'd be more complex and expenseive because they'd have to operate in space without gravity.
Even $1,000 a pound is vastly more than most of those materials would be worth down here, so you'd make much more money from launching a simple manufacturing facility into space and using the asteroid materials to bootstrap your entire space manufacturing infrastructure.
Which is why we need a space station. We barely know how to make space systems on the ground now, much less how to make them in space where everything is more complicated and difficult.
Re:So much rhetoric, so little reality (Score:2)
Ryan
Re:Entropy (Score:2)
But the earth isn't a closed system, we have continuous energy input from the sun. We could use solar energy to extract and concentrate the dispersed platinum. Theoretically, we could just make platinum directly from solar energy if we wanted.
Ryan
Re:Extra Gas (Score:2)
-_Quinn
Re:Read the article yourself. (Score:2)
A.k.a. "noble metals" because of their high resistance to oxidation and corrosion. Rare, costly, and mainly used in catalysts, electronics and jewelry
From the article:
In the first category are gold and the platinum-group metals, which include platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium, rhodium, and ruthenium. These rare elements are in tremendous demand. They are essential to the miniature fuel cell technology that promises efficient, nonpolluting energy. They are also used widely in the electronics industry, for things like high-capacity disk drives and sophisticated capacitors, and as catalysts in pollution control devices.
Re:Entropy again (Score:2)
While you may be correct if you said this about paper, I am certain that you are dead wrong about aluminum. The energy cost of reducing aluminum to metal is enormous, and the scrap price of aluminum (free market!) proves conclusively that it's cheaper to reclaim than to refine.
You forget that you need to collect the can - factor in the transportation, storage, and processing, and in many cases, it's cheaper to make a new can. That's why you have to pay a deposit - there isn't enough of an economic incentive to recover the can (unless you're in some situtations, like a statium, or large urban center. I speak from a Canadian perspective, we have REALLY low population density, so transportation costs are often higher than the value of what you're recycling!).
I won't get into paper. Want to recycle paper? Burn it and sprinkle the ashes around a tree that you just planted.
My point, of course, is that it's not the can, bottle, paper, whatever. It's the total energy consumption in the process.
I bring this point up at least once a month here, so I'll have to get some numbers next time I'm visiting the university. I'm pretty sure I'm right on the alumnium can in my situtation, but I'm not sure about averages.
Re:Entropy (Score:2)
The second poster was close when he said that thermodynamics was the problem, but wrong about the bit on entropy (although close). While recycling initiatives are "Feel good", they do not take into account that in order to do anything, you need energy in some form or another, and there are finite amounts in economically viable forms. (although, "finite" is arbitrary, homo sapiens will have long been gone before earth loses all it's resources. When resources get scarce, we'll just start killing each other). How many days do you think it'd be before marines would be dumping sand outta their boots if the oil got cut off?
You can recycle all you want, but you still need energy to do it. Expending energy transfers heat. Useful heat becomes low quality heat (waste) that heats up the planet. This is the problem (long-term).
There's HORDES of metal here on earth. More than we know what to do with. It's cheaper to mine more aluminum and it's BETTER for the environment as mining more aluminum uses LESS energy than the process of recycling the can, which, of course, is the problem - the energy consumption.
The only advantage of mining space is so that you can build things in space, not return stuff to earth. There's more here than we know what to do with. By building things in space we can develop a commercial interest and economy in space, and by doing that, we'll have someplace to live when, not if, when, earth becomes inhospitable to man.
Read some history. We're never going to be feel good happy animals. We kill each other over resources, same as any other mammal. The over used quote "it is in our nature to destroy ourselves" is dead, bang on. The sooner we accept that and work with it, the sooner we can stop living in denial and plan for things.
Don't believe me? Fine.. but we have much bigger problems to worry about than the availablility of raw materials like metals (check current futures prices for an idea, they're cheap, and plentiful).
Re:So much rhetoric, so little reality (Score:2)
Is the king supposed to just decree that this happens? It will happen eventually, when it makes economic sense. But you have to have an economic space infrastructure to support it.
If you are waiting for when it makes economic sense for companies to move large factories off-planet, you're in for a long wait. It will only become economically feasible when all but the last fraction of a percent of useful resources has already been converted into disposable diapers. Around then, it will be cheaper to get resources from space, and I'm sure the big congolmerates will all launch advertising campaigns about how great they are for caring about the earth and moving their nasty factories into orbit around this useless, polluted, lump of...err, I mean, beautiful, fragile world we call home.
Will this take some serious capital/scientific investments? Absolutely. But the major corporations that own these factories can better afford to foot the bill than the world's governments can, and if the governments actually set some REAL sanctions against pollution, they might actually do it.
And no, of course money does not make science. Scientists make science. How many more scientists do you think would work on this type of project if they could get paid a salary comparable to what they could get in industry? How many goverment employees are in their current jobs because the pay is just outstanding? Pay the scientists what their efforts are worth, and you'll have giant brains the world over lining up on the street to fill out job applications, unlike now, where there are a few idealists and enthusiasts, and the rest guys who couldn't cut it in industry.
Of course, no goverment will ever have the courage to shoot itself in the pocketbook by doing any of this, so the entire discussion is pointless...
Questions on moving an asteriod (Score:2)
So how much would it cost and what would it take to park this thing next to the space station? is it possible to orbit a rocket/sail/whatever big enough to move that thing around up there? Are there better candidate rocks?
If it was parked next to the station, what could we be able to do with it? Would we need an entire factory in orbit before we start?
Re:Who owns the astroids? (Score:2)
First one to land on AN asteroid would probably be able to lay claim to IT. Even if some government decided to lay claim to the asteroid BELT, it'd be pretty much unenforceable.
There are millions of asteroids, and thousands of them are large enough to anchor equipment. There may be other variables of viability, such as usable trajectories of returned mass to Earth, or inter-asteroid collisions, but there's plenty for all developing nations to have their own, several times over.
always the same (Score:2)
Hello, extraction costs? Hello distance? Hello concentration? Yeah right, 'making rocket fuel from icy asteroids' in orbit at 3 AU (a couple of years of travel time). Lets factor in how much fuel you loose just transporting it about
This is so naive.
Re:So much rhetoric, so little reality (Score:2)
I don't know which study you "heard," or even why it would be a study. That knowledge would require calculation, not study.
Let's see:
Size o' Texas: Pretty Fuckin' Big.(PFB)
Size o' land needed for a neighborhood-style home(SOLNFANSH ): 1200 Square Feet
Number o' homies(NOH ): 6 Billion.
NOH / 4 * SOLNFANSH = 1.8 trillion square feet
PFB = 1.4 trillion square feet (I just looked it up)
so, PFB is not quite FBE (Fuckin' Big Enough), and that doesn't include land for things like, oh, say streets 'n stores 'n schools 'n stuff. (and farms and offices and power plants and lots of other things that I excluded because they didn't start with s.)
Pete
Re:What about the MOon? (Score:2)
An ex-apollo astonaut. Well. Now there's an authority. Now if we only knew what Pee-Wee Herman thought about it.
Pete
Re:Asteroid mining can be a reality. (Score:2)
Re:Mining? (Score:2)
Stop just a second. Do you really think that NASA's money is spent in space? No. It's spent down here, on earth. It goes to people here on earth. It trains people here, on earth. It fill libraries and laboratories and universities here, on earth.
Re:Get out of the petri dish or die in the waste (Score:2)
Practical fusion may be farther away than asteroid mining. Let's invest in the hydrogen economy for a while, instead. Which by the way would be helped by access to asteroid mining of platinum et al.
And doing all of the above doesn't relieve us of the need to learn to live sustainably (although stabilizing population is a huge first step.)
Re:All you goofballs (Score:2)
Let's invest in the hydrogen economy for a while, instead.
...eh.
Reality Master 101:
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in
neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
..mmmkay. And I am pretty sure LeCorbusier would have liked us all living like ants in mile-high skyscrapers packed onto Manhattan. Just because the planet can sustain 50 billion human drones packed into megablocks feeding off of reprocessed waste doesn't mean we should set things up that way. Oh, and plus I read in a book once that aliens used to land in the desert in Peru. Honest.
Reality Master 101:
Fusion is an immensely complex problem, and just throwing money at a problem does not produce magical solutions.
...yeah, true, but expending more effort on fusion research than worrying about if NBC can convince Putin to keep Mir in orbit long enough for Survivor in Space would be nice. Billions for Pokemon but scant pennies for fusion and manned spaceflight? I exaggerate but my point is still valid.
rossarian:
6) Develop a working model for a reformed educational system that addresses the needs of every child at a reasonable taxpayer cost. Then become powerful and implement that system.
Project:Continue on the path of human extinction. Overpopulate planet for three centuries. Ridicule manned spaceflight. Hyperemphasize dependency on non-renewable fossil fuels. Decimate biodiversity and fill planet with toxins.
Objective: Survive beyond 2300 without retreating in small numbers into caves.
Anonymous Dipshit:
How on earth did this guy get moderated to 5?
Well, apparently because some people think that moving heavy industry into space while at the same time locking down population growth is a neato idea. Now go back to playing with your blocks.
I concur :) (Score:2)
The best way for an immediate reduction in population growth (providing birth control), however, is strongly hindered by religion. Most countries with high birth rates left in the world are very against the concept of contraception. There are some places that are open to it that don't have it readily available yet, mainly due to logistics issues (some places of india and bangladesh, for example), but not too many.
And, if anyone thinks that telling people not to have sex works, you're wrong
Just my 2 cents.
- Rei
Asteroid mining is just sweeping it under the rug (Score:2)
It seems to me mining asteroids is just going to another place to deplete more resources because it's become difficult to do so here. The more we spread ourselves out, spatially and in effort, the harder it becomes to control the results of our behaviour.
I realise the human race might be extinct by the time all the asteroids in the asteroid belt have run out. But it still seems to me it will take massive amounts of resources just to get the stuff, and in the end we will be talking about really valuable materials, similar to diamonds today, that will only end up being put in rich peoples' jewelry. Just like the jewelry industry today, poor people will be put in dangerous situations by large, amoral corporations to dig out pockets of "space-diamonds" to be put in the jewelry of rich people who couldn't care less. It doesn't seem like a venture that would really help humanity.
To me, there is a natural attractiveness to the idea of a clean, renewable, well-functioning Earth instead of just expanding the mess we have now elsewhere. Wouldn't it be cool if we didn't have to worry about resource usage or where to get resources because we'd worked out all our problems right here? Wouldn't it be nice if we had no pollution, no garbage, no shortages, not because we went elsewhere with a big scheme that will probably only benefit the rich, but because we worked together and found technologies here on Earth that helped us sustain it indefinitely?
Just my two cents...
Re:Asteroid mining can be a reality. (Score:2)
The problem is that none of the people who ultimately make space policy get it. If they did, they'd pretty much be developing better ground to orbit tech and launching the kind of survey missions you mentioned. Right now, NASA is nothing more than a showcase of national prestige intended to generate flashy TV and magazine spots. Those results do not justify the cost, and what;s worse they actually set back the whole idea of space exploration by depicting the whole enterprise as nothing more than an ornament. Its a pitty too because we're very close on many fronts to being able get into space easily. At least if you believe all the optimism in Lockheed's info packets on the Venturstar. BTW is this project still being funded? Anyway, what we need is for one of the policy makers to set a clear achievable goal in this area. That's the big reason why NASA succeeded at sending guys to the moon. They had a clear goal to guide mission planning for the balance of a decade. Of course, the goal has to be sensible. In my opinion going to the moon wasn't really. A better goal would have been to develop a good reusable ground to orbit system and a truly useful space station--one that could be used as a forward base orbital transfer vehicles for mining asteroids. Hey, that'd be a pretty decent goal for today.
Re:Oh great, another resource for man to rape (Score:2)
Re:strange notions of investment (Score:2)
Awe only lasts so long. Space exploration can, and therefore should, pay for itself. Unfortunately, NASA isn't allowed to hang onto its own patents, but if it could, that would certainly generate some revenue. Yes, I'm aware of how the government could abuse that sort of power.
It's a bitch. Any asteroid worth building something on is too big for us to move, being in the miles across size range.
America is largely a capitalist nation, and the world is becoming more and more american over time. Whether this is a good thing or not is an entirely different argument. Regardless, if something doesn't show a reward, it's not a valid expenditure of taxpayer money. Mind you, the amount of research we get out of the space program definitely justifies the money that goes into it; Just in the area of plastics alone, we've made huge jumps because of the space program.
Also, it's not important to change inequality of life on earth, or to eradicate it, or what have you. That's called (depending on the degree) communism or socialism, and it's never been done successfully on this planet. What IS important is to raise everyone above a certain level; They should have a warm, dry place to sleep, be free of disease and parasitic infestation, have enough healthy food to eat and clean water to drink, and so on. A disturbing number of people on this earth are not in that situation, and that's what we should be concerned with. Don't worry about people who have more than other people; Worry about people who don't have enough resources to live.
Oh, and a further note there, survival ain't living. People should also have leisure time even if they don't have anything especially entertaining (or at least not to you and me, perhaps) to do with it, and at the end of the day, they should have enough energy to do it. I consider leisure a basic requirement of life. Without it, people go insane, and end up like Ross Perot.
Cruithne is not a good option (Score:2)
An asteroid passing near Earth orbit could be mucked with to make it come back at an appropriate time -- that would be good. Get everybody on it, attach rockets, and fire it away so that it comes back in two years when it's ready to offload some material.
Cruithne would not be any closer that this and would actually be farther most of the time due to its crazy-ass orbit. More dangerously, however, changing Cruithne's mass could very easily send it crashing into New York.
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Fuel usage depends on MASS, not WEIGHT (Score:2)
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Am I missing something? (Score:2)
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physics (Score:2)
Not really. It takes just as much momentum change to do a transfer orbit from near-earth space to an asteroid as it does to get back from the asteroid's orbit to near-earth space.
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Re:Space Mining, Yes! (Score:2)
Uh, they're in orbit around the sun, not the earth. It still takes massive amounts of rocket fuel to get them to near-earth space and inserted into earth orbit.
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Re:Asteroid mining can be a reality. (Score:2)
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Re:Am I missing something? (Score:2)
Um, that just makes the problem worse. Instead of just moving the valuable parts of the asteroid, you want to move the whole thing? It takes huge amounts of rocket fuel to do this kind of orbit change. Even a small asteroid could easily run to billions of kilograms.
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Re:Questions on moving an asteriod (Score:2)
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Re:It won't happen before 2010, but . . . (Score:2)
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Re:China To Mine The Moon (Score:2)
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Logic (Score:2)
By the way, to put this all in perspective, orbital velocities around the sun are typically an order of magnitude greater than low-earth-orbit velocities. This makes it extremely expensive to send any significant amount of mass across the solar system. That's why it would be a huge technological accomplishment to bring back a 1-kg sample of Mars dirt that we could test for bacteria. (The Viking tests were inconclusive.) By contrast, bringing back even 1000 kg of metal from an asteroid is extremely ambitious, and that wouldn't even be a blip on the charts in terms of the world's production.
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Re:Getting the materials to the factory? (Score:2)
For instance... if you build a factory on some asteroid, the people working there would presumably be living there on the asteriod. Hence, living quarters and offices and such would be set up there. When the asteriod is mined out, and they decide to move on, the structure is still there, and able to be used as a supply point.
Hence, all that would have to be done is keep hopping from one rock to the next, expanding onwards and out, keeping these small resupply colonies along the way...
Dont forget (Score:2)
Although I think mining asteroids is a great idea - and a very worthy goal of human effort (effort much better spent than watching TV and destroying the planet with consumerism/greed and corporate imperialism (another argument)) - We are 'very close' to digging a hole in a Asteroid, which is a great distance from being able to actually do something useful with what we dig up.
SpaceDev (Score:2)
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right order. (Score:2)
The fact that we don't even begin to have such machines here on Earth doesn't seem to bother them. Mining of any type here on earth requires a lot of people to decide where to place the explosives etc.
I suppose that it would be conceivable to make some type of 'remote waldo' type of machines for the work, but I suspect that speed of light makes that pretty impossible. Move your hand and 10 seconds later the remote hand moves, then 10 seconds later you see the hand move. I don't see how that would work.
I think the only way to build mining equipment smart enough is to have a man controlling them. When you do that you have the habitat problem which the space station is designed to explore. The big plus from the space station is the millions of lines of tested, debugged, known good code, which the space station project will eventually deliver.
If you are going to have humans working in space then you need to have habitats that are long term livable. First the space station - then the mining, you can't do it any other way.
The fact that none of these people have ever put so much as a Tonka toy into space seems not to bother them at all. They strike me as 'know it alls'; i.e. the cluelessly confidant people who exist in the bottom 10 percentile of any given field.
Re:right order. (Score:2)
Just because you know how to build a mud hut doesn't mean you know how to build an apartment building. That is why we are doing it - to find out if we do know enough to handle that level job before we do more ambitious things.
Space technology is expensive; that is just a fact. It is important to note that none of those 60 billion dollars has left the earth - the money is still in circulation here stimulating the economy.
Extra Gas (Score:2)
Re:Get out of the petri dish or die in the waste (Score:2)
Okay...so....6 billion people...expanding geometrically...regressive regimes that refuse to curb birth rates or educate people...massive pollution...hmm...I'm sure everything will be fine for a few thousand more years...
Wrongo.
Wrongo, says you. You'll forgive me if I put just as much stock in your own doomsday vision of How Our Race Will End(tm) as I do in my own version (read: not much.) Let's go into a bit of an analysis of your proposed salvation of humanity:
1. Educate people enough to stop over-reproducing (shouts removed.) Thr trouble with this is, you can't educate reproductive habits. Truth be told, having a buttload of kids is a hard, taxing endeavor; people, when given an environment where they have things like life insurance, stable jobs and *gasp* Social Security, no longer feel the need or desire to crank out 12 or 13 kids to help run the farm and care for them in their old age. Education, while it runs pretty much statistically parallel to the number of children per family, is not a means for reducing population growth; rather, it is a result of higher quality of life in general, just as lower birth rates are. In a poor, underdeveloped country, each child born equals another opportunity to have some hope of care if and when you age, and will help reduce the amount of work you need to do once they are old enough to help with the household tasks. Education and birth rate are related, but the one cannot be used to directly influence the outcome of the other.
2. Distribute resources to feed the billions already on this planet. Why, so they can go and keep reproducing? The fact that we've already gotten so good at distributing the world's food supply is part of why there are so many of us now. (question: how long have banannas been a staple entry in virtually every American/European grocery store? That is some serious distribution of tropical fruit!) If you want to effectively lower the number of people on this planet, the last thing you want to do is supply every last one of them with food to eat! (Note: this sounds like a really shitty thing to say. It is; it's also true. True things can be amazingly shitty, but that fact does not invalidate them.)
3. Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points. This obviously necessitates the acquisition of asteroid raw materials. That is, indeed, an excellent idea. Of course, setting up a viable space station of international collaboration capable of supporting a regular crew over long periods of time is an essential early step in this mass exodus of the manufacturing industry to the final frontier; perhaps we should start with this first. Oh, wait--we're already working on this. Well hell, let's get those factories up there, then! And while we're at it, we'll instantiate a unified global government and unify people of all faiths and races in harmony! Chop chop, folks--no, don't bother me with the details, just do it!
Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development. I'm not talking about 20 guys in Berkely zapping a molecule of tritium every 18 months. We need Manhattan Projec[t] importance attached to this. Another good idea, but again, the need isn't urgent enough. If humanity ends up being a full 200 years in developing fusion power to a viable level (which I sincerely doubt will be the case), do you really think that it will have made that big of a difference 2000 years later? If you want to look at the long term effects of a problem, you need to step away from the "as soon as physically possible" delivery schedule for the solution. Humanity has a whole mess of things that "need their immediate and undivided attention" if we apply this same mindset to every other long term problem humanity is facing; you'll find that fusion power falls neatly into a big-ass clump of things that we can't possibly put off until tomorrow.
Nature has, does and will continue to adapt to humanity; it just may not be in ways we particularly like (mass famine, plague, loss of farmable land, costal flooding, etc.) What's more, while nature is perfectly capable of trimming us down to size when we outgrow our bounds, it's quite unlikely that nature will see fit to completely wipe us off the planet.
That sort of totality requires a human touch.
$ man reality
As always, watch out for that first step... (Score:2)
I agree with you completely. Unfortunately, it's the first step that is the hardest. Hopefully, we will be able to use the ISS Alpha as a base for constructing/deploying the first orbital factories. In this manner, it could provide economic as well as scientific returns.
Two more thoughts before I leave... Why not bring the entire asteroid into earth orbit, then use the leftover slag as a foundation for constructing further industrial plants? Thought #2 - I think that it won't be until we have a sizeable industrial sector based in orbit that we will be able to do any human exploration of our solar system. The gravity well is a killer when it comes to consuming resources. Imagine how much easier it would be to make a lander+orbiter if you didn't have to boost it off the earth first. There would be (virtually) no size limitation, as well as no need for heavy heat shielding, and no necessity to carry thousands of pounds of fuel for the sole purpose of boosting hundreds of pounds of fuel up to where you will need them.
Who owns the astroids? (Score:2)
Mining? (Score:2)
Asteroid research, perhaps - finding new elements and compounds, or extremely rare ones, but other than that no - even gold mining wouldn't be cost effective - it would cost far more than the gold was worth to collect it.
In addition, there are probably many undiscovered, but scientifically valuable, things in the rainforests of the world - and yet these are being destroyed while NASA goes into space. Why not a NASA for the seas or rainforests? I'm sure they could spend that money much better than in space. Is it just because space is sexy, and politically useful, but the seas are not?
Supply and demand (Score:3)
Before you get too excited, better look at ecconomics. Sure that astorid you are talking about mining to death has a few trillion dollars worth of metal on it. Sure you can mine it cheaper in the long run becuse you build a mini-refinery on it, and then use local materials to build a big one, and solar power for everything. Then you flood earth with whatever raw material. Opps, turns out that prices on raw metal haven't been going anywhere for a long time. Since you are using robots and solar power your costs are lower (assuming a good delevery system), but you have to contend with supply and demand. Lowering the price of iron doesn't increase demand anymore. All the customers want lower prices and there is compititon to keep prices lower, but the demand is fixed, we can produce more iron then we need. So you come in with your load of iron and now have to sell it to a market that by your presence isn't paying as much.
Long term it is a good idea. Why mine prime land when you can put a wildlife refuge or something else that is beatiful there. We have unlimmited asteroids (okay, but close enough), and nobody cares are them as nothing is living on them.
Remember don't invest money unless you are sure you can make money. If your mining platanum that is no problem, you can drive prices down and compittion out of buisness, with $.50/lb platinum (currently more then $500.00/lb if I remember right) becuase the stuff is usefully chemically if we could get enough to use it everywhere we want to. I think anyway, but you do your own homework before investing money.
Re:strange notions of investment (Score:3)
I can assure you that increases in wealth of one parts of Earth's population are rapidly transferred to others, although international market barriers often keep this from happening. If you look at Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, you'll understand that it is actually economically most efficient for producers to produce what they can best make. Advanced countries should design computers, not make tennis shoes. Less advanced countries should produce tennis shoes. Over time, the sale of cheap tennis shoes will bring wealth into the country (above subsistance farming, for example). The population will become better educated, and wealth flows will allow entrepreneurism (a great uncle of mine started a plastic bag factory in his native El Salvador, for example). Of course, the US still imposes protectionist tarriffs on Salvadoran textiles, because we're greedy and don't want Salvadoran peasants to have jobs...but that's why we have spoiled rich college students protesting the WTO and such.
Another example, 50 years ago, Korea was at the level of subsistance farming, now (at least the southern part) has a modern economy. Every impoverished country on the planet has a combination of a lack of democracy or a lack of enforcement of rights to personal property or both.
If we are to truly be in space, it will have to be in an economically sustainable manner. I'm not totally again socialized space science, but I know it alone will not keep us in space.
Space Mining, Yes! (Score:3)
Secondly, about "spending the money on the rainforest instead": show me some results. The money spent on the space program has benefitted the US economy immensely due to the spinoff technologies and industries it has created. We're talking at least a tenfold return on investment. It has also greatly benefitted medical science, and even our understanding of the environment. It's been a tremendous bargain, frankly, and we haven't even spent that much on it in comparison with things like, say welfare.
What has your side accomplished lately?
Jon Acheson
Re:So much rhetoric, so little reality (Score:3)
"Education"? Educate them about what? People are going to reproduce if they want to. Any other solution requires the government to regulate whether you can reproduce or not, which is a thousand times worse than anything (look at China).
Actually, no, education really does help overpopulation. Again and again, the number one way people have found to lower population growth is to increase female literacy. It makes sense, most of these women in developing countries don't necessarily want ten kids apiece. By increasing female literacy, you help people economically and you help them decide their own birth control strategy.
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
BS. Sure, and do you know how many miles of farming you need to support each of those people at a USA level of consumption. How many acres of trees to build each of those homes. How many acres of mines, powerplants, railroads, businessparks, distribution centers, shopping centres, etc. this takes?
You are fooling yourself if you think your statistic is even vaguely insightful.
I agree with most of the rest of the post. Except for the bit about fusion. Granted, there is no place you can go and say "I'd like fusion technology, how much is that?" But larger amounts of funds for research will cause it to happen sooner than later.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:3)
I was just doing a gross sanity check, not make a precise calculation. Obviously it's takes a lot less energy to drop something from space than to launch things into space. Certainly, the basic problem is lifting the matter out of the gravity well, but the cost, I believe, is not due to the fact that propellant is expensive, but that the systems you need to do this reliably and safely are complex, unique and require costly engineering and workmanship. The degree to which these factors apply is in part a function of mass (not to mention safety).
My gut feeling is that all these factors apply in spades to a realistic asteroid iron mining system. Consider that it would have rendezvous with a good sized aseteroid, extract millions of tons of iron, change the ore's velocity and position to put it in earth orbit, and then safely deposit it undamaged on the planet surface -- shooting artificial meteors into the ocean doesn't count. In fact if there were a slug of iron just the right size to fit in the space shuttle's cargo bay sitting in orbit, I doubt it would be economical to go up there and fetch it, even though you wouldn't have the delta-v problem.
It ain't going to happen anytime soon for iron, but maybe in our life time it could happen for iridium; or if they found platinum or rhodium in an asteroid. These metals have values per weight that are several orders of magnitude higher than the value of iron. Saying there's trillions of bucks worth of iron up there is like the sci fi writers who speculated that Jupiter might have diamonds at its core, or perhaps that at its core there might be a giant diamond. It's interesting, but doubtful if it would ever be economical to do anything about it.
The point I was trying to make is that it doesn't make sense to call ISS a boondoggle and say what we really should be doing is asteroid mining. The ISS is a logical next step towards learning how to do things in space, including development of industrial systems.
But... (Score:3)
an asteroid mine when the automated mining bots
are infected with a computer virus created by a
rogue arms manufacturing / mining corporation to
overthrow the government!
I miss Descent...
Re:That's Smart. . . but not the ONLY Advantage. . (Score:3)
Exactly. From what I understand, the major cost of establishing a permanent presence in space is getting it started. After a certant point, with the exception of a few things that need to be provided by earth, it becomes financially self-sustaining. Of course, then you run into the same problem as the British did with their colonies back a couple of hundred years or so.
-RickHunter
Establishing a self-sufficient base outside Earth (Score:3)
We'll take Mars as our sample planet to establish a base on, as it is a far more similar environment to earth, and I know more about it than the moon, easier for humans to survive on (more gravity means less muscular atrophy, etc)). We'll start with the assumption that we're stuck with in the current day: that we can only transport tools and small pieces of equiptment into space, not entire factory structures or even moderate quantities of raw materials.
1) Power. This is critical - you need power to do anything. Constructing a decent sized power plant takes time, and, for an initial base, having human
labor as your only source of energy to establish a power plant is unfeasable. I recommend a small, self-contained nuclear generator. Not using... oh, whats that called, the phenominon where a difference in temperature at a junction creates electricity... but a self-contained steam turbine which collects all the steam and cools it. This would be assembled on earth or in space, and then landed. This would be used for all mining/construction vehicles until the next stage could be assembled. This stage takes a large field of mirrors which rotate in 2 axises to follow the sun and focus its light on a piece of metal in the center. The turbine-and-steam-collection part from the old nuclear reactor is detached, and attached to the new source of solar heat. This technique is used on earth in a few places, but would be far more efficient in most other places in our solar system, where more light makes it to the surface and there is a greater difference in temperature between the steam and the outside atmosphere.
2) Resource collection. Also critical (ok, ok, everything discussed here is critical...). This would be best if it could be completely automated by a decent navigational AI. Basicly a small truck, rechargable (fuel cells, perhaps?), which has the capability to crumble the rock in the area the base is to be established, and either suction it or scoop it up into its bin. It runs back and forth between the ground and mineral processing.
3) Mineral processing. A few companies are working on devices like this in the present day. A system which is directly connected to a good power source, and melts all minerals put into it. Then, by various methods (separation of layers, electrolysis, etc), it gives you individual elements or critical compounds. Such output on mars, the most critical elements would be iron (quite abundant, generally in iron oxide), water (assembleable, possibly even minable directly in the form of ice), and oxygen (plenty to free from the rocks). Unwanted minerals could be thrown out, or saved for later processing by a future device. Also, atmospheric processing could
occur in a similar way (one would need to refrigerate, not heat, of course). Naturally, all devices would be, for the time, assembled on earth.
4) Component creation. This is a large scale extension of current 3-dimensional printers, and extending it to use of metals, assumably in most
cases, steel. One is fed in a 3d model, and it prints out the model. This may be fairly difficult to extend it to metals as such, as generally the method involves layering down a material that is soluable with some certain
compound in the spots where the desired material isn't to be placed, and the desired material where it is to be placed. Thus, we'd either need to
transport a very large quantity of both the material to be dissolved and the material to dissolve, or to create them both on mars. The later would be far preferable, but I leave it to the chemists to come up with a way to do
that, for now
of the original's components but building the large structural components with the smaller machine, to save weight.
5) Assembly. A series of cranes, welding torches, and other devices would be needed, in addition to people. If AI advances enough, expensive human
costs could be reduced with at least limited automatic assembly of components into structures.
6) Organic compounds. Hydroponics appears to be the best way to go for food and plant producs, seeds and nutrients brought in from earth. Animal
products should be avoided if at all possible, shipped in, or produced from easily replicable things like geneticly modified bacteria. Polymers should be generated from geneticly modified or naturally occuring bacteria in tanks constructed on the spot. The more automated every system is, such as plant growing, the lower the human cost, which will probably be the largest total
cost
7) Intricate components. Until a base is firmly established, all intricate components should be shipped in. Constructing a factory to produce, say, a pentium 3, would be truly immense task, involving many many compounds and many people. Even a simple electric motor would be difficult at first. So, ship them in
8) Profitability. For mars, not much in the immediate future. For the moon, helium 3 might prove profitable, but profitability is the last step, not the first. However, there is one good thing that happens here - all of the research into automating systems to cut the human cost would be immediatly applicable here on earth, too.
- Rei
don't feed the billions (Score:3)
Re:Basic Economics? (Score:3)
stockpile until the market dries up enough so that the price rockets up to the point where the producer can still profit.
the us government has LONG understood this, at least since midway through the great depression, and actually PAYS farmers the vaule of their would-be crop to not grow wheat, corn, and various other crops just so that farmers who do produce can be profitable. there's actually an entire sub economy in montana of people who own areas of land of 25,000 acres and live in huge mansions.
how do they make their money? by not growing wheat on that land. and the land is (nearly) tax-free, of course, because it's legitimate farm land. same deal with space mining. too much production? talk to the other miners and tell them to hold back production till prices rise. sound familiar?
ever heard of OPEC? bravo. BASIC ECONOMICS.
So much rhetoric, so little reality (Score:3)
I'm sure all this sounds really good around the college dorm room, and I'm sure the chicks are very impressed. The problem is that your "solutions" either mean nothing or won't work. Let's take them one at a time...
EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
"Education"? Educate them about what? People are going to reproduce if they want to. Any other solution requires the government to regulate whether you can reproduce or not, which is a thousand times worse than anything (look at China).
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
Distribute resources to feed the billions already on the planet.
The world goes hungry not because of an unequal distribution of resources, but because of an unequal distribution of capitalism. It's a political problem, not a resource problem. If you want to feed the world, change the governments.
Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points.
Is the king supposed to just decree that this happens? It will happen eventually, when it makes economic sense. But you have to have an economic space infrastructure to support it.
Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development.
You seem to think that this has not already been done. Fusion is an immensely complex problem, and just throwing money at a problem does not produce magical solutions. The manhattan project succeeded not because of money, but because the world's smartest people gathered in one place out of patriotism. NOT out of money. Money is not the solution to every problem.
Fusion will happen, but we need some fundamental engineering breakthroughs first.
I'll just ignore all the other alarmist ranting, if you don't mind.
--
Basic Economics? (Score:3)
Metals are a commodity and their prices are affected by supply and demand. Rare metals that can be used in a number of high tech industries have a high price since there is a large demand, but only a limited supply.
NEO 3554 Amun is worth more than all of the platinum metal resources on Earth by several trillion dollars at today's prices only by virtue of being inaccessible. If it could be easily mined then those commodity price would fall quickly.
Alternatively, if the mining organisation maintained prices, thus maximising revenues, but the process by which they were doing it were relatively easily repeatable by others then comptitors would go looking for their own rocks - otherwise known as competition.
Also if the metals could be recovered and transported cheaply enough you could look to see even more mining companies going bust. (Though given the enironmental damage some of the mining companies have done that ain't necessarily a bad thing)
Save the Earth, do our laundry somewhere else (Score:3)
Asteroid mining can be a reality. (Score:3)
New advances in ultrasonic drilling is reducing the complexity of asteroid sampling devices, and vaccuum smelting processes are being actively pursued. These, plus the scientific observations afforded by the Shoemaker-NEAR spacecraft will make it possible to avoid paying $10,000+ a lb to carry the materials needed to build tomorrows space colonies and industrial space presence.
The types of missions people pay the most attention to are the warm and fuzzy ones like J. Glenn's return to space and the Mars Pathfinder. The missions that will provide the best return on our investment in the future are the Cassini's, the SOHOs, and the Shoemaker-NEAR. They may not be as flashy as a remote control car driving a few feet on Mars, but they provide the type of rock-hard scientific data that's needed to get us into space for keeps.
--
I concur, and then some... (Score:4)
Ha - sorry dude, but the human race is coming to an end and we're the losers. Or our children or their children. We don't think ahead. We don't take steps early. A few of us voice what we _all_ know, but the rest of us, well, wait for a shepherd to take care of it. Us sheep are too busy munching on this stale and poluted grass to do anything about it. The answers have been around for years, the technology has been around for years but the smartness is not there. Don't blame it on the "Twisted and Evil" oil empire - it's simple lazy stupidity that's the fault here. Wonder who'll replace us when we're gone...
BTW - Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
strange notions of investment (Score:4)
While reading this article I'm sure some people were thinking of the investment possibilities of funding an asteroid mining operation. The thought of a multi-trillion dollar asteroid is appealing, but the article takes a pretty naive view of wealth.
We really live in a world of plenty. There is more than enough food and resources for everyone on earth, but a small portion of the population controls the majority of the resources for political reasons. Make no doubt about it, the same entities which control the majority of wealth now would claim ownership of space resources. I doubt if this would improve the lives of the disenfranchised or make many changes here on earth.
I can definitely see how this would make long term space station operation more affordable. In fact, I would tend to think that the most sensible route would be to use a large asteroid as a space station foundation. Build the station on the asteroid itself. I can't see the point of harvesting the materials and moving them to another location. This probably relates to the potential for altering the trajectory of an asteroid for our purposes, and I'll confess I'm not familiar with the challenges of doing this.
I'm rambling a bit, but my point is that pure science shouldn't have to promise us that it can turn lead to gold or turn a profit. It also shouldn't imply that riches in space will change the inequity of life on earth, because that is a political and social challenge that science is largely unable to affect.
Elemental metals (Score:4)
Producing the elemental form of a metal from these compounds is a pretty simple chemical reaction. For example, iron oxides are reduced using carbon, producing iron and CO2. Unfortunately, this means that a vast amount of CO2 is released to the environment in the process. There are no shortcuts and no significantly cleaner ways to do it - it's basic chemistry. You get a few kilograms of CO2 for each kilogram of steel you produce. Add do that the energy required in the process which is usually also produced by burning fossil fuels and you end up with around 20 kilograms of CO2 for each kilogram of steel. Take a moment to think about the weight of your car. The emissions it will produce over its entire lifetime are about the same magnitude as the amount produced just in reducing the metal, not to mention the environmental cost of producing other parts.
Some asteroids were large enough (and hot enough) for the lighter compounds to float to the surface. After they cooled down they were struck by other asteroids and the chunks that came from their cores are almost pure elemental metals.
Getting them closer Earth is the tricky part. The delta-Vs required not too high for some of the asteroids, though. The cheapest and most practical method of slowing them down as they approach the Earth is aerobraking. I suspect that this solution will not be too popular, though...
----
That's Smart. . . but not the ONLY Advantage. . . (Score:4)
The REAL impact of asteroidal mining/processing would be to eliminate most mining activities, especially bulk mining, hydraulic mining, and strip mining for metals. All have nasty environmental side effects, and are ugly and difficult to boot.
Plus you have the advantage of nearly unlimited energy from the Sun, either via solar cells for electricty, or via mirrors concentrating light to power smelting processes. And, once you have one good industrial plant Up There, you can bootstrap off of it to make another: several years of "bacterial" growth of orbital industrial plants, and you have a sizeable economic base in space. . . (g)
There, IMNSHO, is the REAL advantage of asteroidal.space mining. . .
Ore Grades Are More Than Concentration (Score:4)
In the early 80s Richard Gertz, professor at the Colorado School of Mines, was studying various techniques for mining extraterrestrial resources. He had obtained and analyzed samples of asteroids from meteorites for their "ore grade". His opinion was that Lewis was off in his estimate of the ore grades available on the asteroids -- that although the concentrations of precious metals was high, their thermodynamic availability was lower than would be considered economic to mine on the earth. He further pointed to a nickle-iron 'asteroid' that had actually fallen somewhere in Australia -- they know where it is and that it contains enough nickle and iron to supply a good chunk of the world's needs for these metals -- but they just don't have a way to cut it up economically. This is a guy who actually ran his own, one man, cyanide gold leaching process at an abandoned mine in the middle of the desert so he took his mining seriously and he was really interested in doing space resource work.
I haven't had a chance to look at Lewis's stuff myself primarily because based on Gertz's analysis and the reputation Gertz had with folks I dealt with at the California Space Institute who were analyzing lunar rocks for utilization (primarily insitu but also including LOX generation) I decided I would have to shove his stuff way down on my list of priorities to read.
Earlier this year, the Colorado School of Mines hosted the first-ever roundtable on "Space Resource Utilization." That's funny -- I went back to the article and found this reference to Gertz's institution. So far as I know, Gertz was the only guy at CSM doing space resource utilization back in the early 80s.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5)
And, moving stuff around in space is not very expensive compared to the cost of lifting stuff out of Earth's gravity well. If you're willing to move stuff over the course of a few months, ion propulsion and favorable orbital mechanics make it doable.
Jon Acheson
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5)
Sure, but the article also says that launching about quart of water into orbit costs over a quarter million bucks according to the same article. Consider the cost of going farther, extracting the material, and applying the delta V to get it back down to earth. If the article's figure are correct, assuming two pounds of water costs about $300,000 to launch we get something over $9000 per ounce to launch. Assuming the cost to extract the material and get it back to earth is roughly on the same order of magnitude as the launch costs (a very generous assumption), then we aren't going to be mining asteroids for iron and nickel any time soon. Even iridium which is much more valuable goes for something like $400 per troy ounce -- you'd lose 8K$ on every ounce you brought back.
It'd be more economical to mine landfills for iron and nickel we've already thrown away.
I'm not saying asteroid won't happen eventually, but the technology has to develop a lot farter to make it economical. The ISS is a step towards developing more economical space technology.
Get out of the petri dish or die in the waste (Score:5)
Wrongo.
We either move the factories off this rock or we drown in our own wastes. We either crack the controlled fusion problem (maybe we should spend more money on that than...say...cosmetics? Nah...)
or we are going to bleed the planet dry of petrochemicals----and drown in more waste. Fusion too tough for 5 or 6 decades? Get powersats in orbit (constructed with asteroidal raw materials) or its going to be brownouts for the next hundred years. Not to mention the air is going to be brown anyway...
Look folks, all you general luddites, "its too expensive, we should worry about Social Security"-ers, "Mother Gaia will protect herself"-ers, and "well, uh, things won't be too bad for another hundred years or so"-ers need to shut the hell up. Either control birthrates and educate the starving billions or we are going to collapse under the mass of our waste and energy and resource consumption.
1. EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
2. Distribute resources to feed the billions already on the planet.
3. Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points. This obviously necessitates the acquisition of asteroid raw materials.
4. Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development. I'm not talking about 20 guys in Berkely zapping a molecule of tritium every 18 months. We need Manhattan Projecy importance attached to this.
Of course....NONE of this will get done. Only after the planet is a teeming desert where we all suck smog and eat krill steaks will anyone stop to think...gee...maybe we should have put some effort into orbital industries and Belt mining.
Oh well. Everybody get back to watching Survivor II. Bye now.
Re:Oh great, another resource for man to rape (Score:5)
Repeat after me:
Star Trek is NOT a documentary.
Thank you
Asteroid mining is easy! (Score:5)
Getting the materials to the factory? (Score:5)