NASA On Mining Extraterrestrial Sources 214
FortKnox writes "Looks like something from the game "Homeworld", but NASA discusses mining ore from planets/asteroids or any other source of "Cosmic Dirt"." I remember debating this idea in high school debate - it's a wonderful idea.
The spice must flow! (Score:1, Funny)
Recent IEEE Spectrum article on Asteroid Mining (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Recent IEEE Spectrum article on Asteroid Mining (Score:2, Insightful)
The only problem is (Score:2)
Some iron, maybe a little nickel would be available. However, I think that water (being lighter) would also the first target because it gives a lot of versatility for a mission, from life support (O2 and H20) to propulsion.
Re:Recent IEEE Spectrum article on Asteroid Mining (Score:2)
And in fact, the Moon may be the ideal place to have a first go at building a space elevator - IIRC the mass of a space elevator structure decreases as the cube of the gravitational force. So a gravity of 1/6 G would give you a space elevator 1/216 of the size required on Earth. This not only makes it easier to get the stuff to build it, but also means that some of the insanely-difficult engineering problems for Earth's space elevator (the problems of the lower structure supporting that mass) may simply not be necessary.
Grab.
Re:Recent IEEE Spectrum article on Asteroid Mining (Score:2)
Still check out NeoFuel [neofuel.com]. It talks about using water from NEO's and/or the moon for space travel/mining. Looks quite practical.
this is a job for... Asimo! (Score:2, Funny)
BEN
right... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wonderful idea or not, we're decades away from this. Right now, we can barely get people to the moon. We managed to get a tiny little explorer to the moon. Now, they're already thinking about putting PEOPLE on mars?
Take things one step at a time, I say. Let's wait a while, allow the technology to improve, and then evaluate what to do once we can place people on other planets.
I'm sure we can come up with far better things to do if we could get humans on Mars. And I pray it doesn't involve stripping the planet of its natural resources like we're doing here on Earth. I hope by the time this becomes reality, we're better at drawing resources from nature (i.e. solar power) and that we won't have to resort to strip mining on other planets just to keep up our quality of life here on Earth.
-NeoTomba
Re:right... (Score:2)
Of course, this is exactly what NASA is good at. Writing huge documents which are totally impossible to implement for at least 30 years. In 5 years time, they'll rewrite it from scratch, because all of the assumptions in the orignal document are now wrong. Repeat until you have 15 versions of 100,000 page reports.
Re:right... (Score:2, Insightful)
Technology improves when you invest in it and use it.
Personally, I'd rather we strip mine the fuck out of Mars and the Moon than our one and only home. Terraforming or no.
Re:right... (Score:2)
There's more to the argument than just tech-for-the-sake-of-tech...
Re:right... (Score:2, Interesting)
The primary use of space mining would be to provide resources for continued exploration of space. Getting people and equipment to Mars and the Outer Planet and moons would be much less costly if a lot of the material could be picked up form the Moon, Earth Orbit, or Mars. Currently, a trip to Mars requires launching enough fuel to get to Mars, food for the entire trip, and all equipment.
Let's say then that the Moon has been developed into a space pit stop. With facilities for manufacturing and storing fuel from lunar material.
facilities for growing and processing food for a Mars trip. So from, earth we just need to launch the vehicle, people, and enough fuel and supplies to get to the mooon. The crew lands on the moon picks up enough fuel and supplies to get to Mars, and only has to overcome lunar gravity and earth's gravity 300,000 miles away.
The next step would be to have a reusable Earth/Moon transport, and manufacture a Moon/Mars vehicle that would never return to Earth, but would be maintained, fueled and supplied from the Moon. The step after that would be to completely manufacture supply and fueld non Earth/Moon space vehicles on the moon. The nect step would be the development of the space elevator such that the people and what little couldn't be manufactured in space could be moved to geosynchronous orbit. And, from their be transported via lunar manufactured spacecraft to the moon for refuel and resupply. And, the next step from their is to mvoe resource rich asteroids and comets (for water) into Earth, lunar, Mars, Ganymede orbit as orbital pit stops to reduce the need for a space craft to enter a gravity well for resupply, refit, and/or refuel.
Basically, what it comes down to is that human exploration and development of space needs to involve planet/moon hopping. First, develop facilities on the moon, from there do the same to a martian moon, from their hit Mars, the asteroid belt and Jupiters moons. Then, eliminate the moon from the equation as much as possible and make an asteroid in lunar or earth orbit the way station from Earth to the rest of the solar system.
Any other method is just not efficient, and requires too much stuff to be launched from Earth.
Dastardly
Re:right... (Score:2, Informative)
You missed the point. The point is not to spend $400 million launching stuff into near earth orbit. The point is to try and use stuff that is already their to launch stuff farther into space. The ISS is built 100% from stuff on earth. And, every single kilogram was launched from Earth into orbit. If we had a source of material and manufacturing in orbit, some of that material would not have needed to be launched from Earth. Eliminating some of those $400 million launches.
The real problem is that most of the plans keep skipping the moon. We need to start from the moon because it is closer and therefore cheaper. We need to explore it completely to figure out what resources are available, where, and what can be done with them. Then, we launch the minimum amount of people, equipment, and material to exploit the lunar reqources and build a self sustaining mining and manufacturing operation.
Supposedly there are a lot of very useful materials that could be manufactured in 0G that cannot be done under gravity. By moving production of space stations to the moon where the lower surface gravity and lack of air will make launching much cheaper, we could build a space station much larger than the ISS that could be used to manufacture materials that are impossible to manufacture under gravity. Those materials could be dropped form the station to Earth at very low cost. Especially, if everything except people are received from the moon.
Dastardly
Re:right... (Score:2)
Graham.
Mines in Space (Score:1)
I mean, it beats starting a land war of mineral deposits.
Re:Mines in Space (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mines in Space (Score:2)
More to the point, they won't exist until after some profit comes from space to Earth to fund the development of things needed to build them. One possibility: mining platinum-group metals for use on Earth, since they are valuable in and of themselves on Earth. Leave the rock, and maybe the iron and nickel, up there for later when we get around to building colonies. But bring that shiny pricey metal down here so we can pay off our creditors today, so that we can build space colonies tomorrow!
Re:Mines in Space (Score:2)
How many tonnes of space crudd fall on the earth each day?
Why not just focus on colonizing mars? (Score:1)
Re:Why not just focus on colonizing mars? (Score:1)
comets (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect that more resources are going to be needed. And a bit of terraforming to make it much more sustainable. You want to be able to have the thing last on it's own, sustain itself and grow.
This gets into things like altering the paths of comets so that they crash into Mars depositing all kinds of extra water into the place. But that raises all kinds of questions. For example there is this old debate [nasa.gov] on if the earth is being constantly pelted on by mini-comets. If this is happening on Earthe, what is going on at mars?
All kinds of things to talk about.
What's next a space elevator? (Score:1)
Don't forget about energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Although an incentive for continued reliance on petroleum is a Bad Thing(tm) for the environment, alternative energy research, and noise, it is nice to see that there may be a breakthrough that helps ease our pain when we run out of oil on Earth.
~wally
Re:Don't forget about energy (Score:2)
Idiocy (Score:2, Informative)
planet it's on (Titan is a likely place to find it) and back to Earth far exceeds the
energy content of the oil itself. No way is NASA seriously considering it - and if it
is then I'm going to have to start working somewhere else, because it must have been taken over by idiots.
Re:Don't forget about energy (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Don't forget about energy (Score:2)
ummmmm, no (Score:2)
Re:Impact on the Middle East (Score:2)
>>became industrialized and started needing more >>energy, but it is ludicrous to think that the
>>rate of change will remain constant.
And you need to see past the end of your nose. The USA isn't the only country in the world.
How many BILLIONS of people in India and China don't even own a bicycle let alone a car? These countries (along with dozens more) are very eager to catch up to the 'west' in technology -> which implies a huge grown in energy demand.
Mining ET rocks (Score:1)
mine WHAT? (Score:4, Insightful)
Taylor explained that work should focus on the "unusual economics" of planetary ores, including the relationship of lunar and Martian development to each other.
Unusual economics is a good euphimism for "ungodly expensive", especially in transport costs. Whatever we're mining, it would have to be extremely valuable per ounce, right?
Aggregate will be an important resource on both the Moon and Mars. Here on Earth, it is the most mined material in the United States, at some 2.3 billion tons a year. It is used for roads, concrete, bridges, roofing materials, and glass
Aggregate? Not Iridium, Gold, Plutonium, Scandium, or "rare earth" metals so expensive we haven't even heard of them? AGGREGATE? Rock?
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton right now. A metric ton of aggregate crap... you can mine out of my back yard.
I must be missing something.
Re:mine WHAT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't that because of takeoff? Once you get something going in space (ie, out of gravities way), it's cheaper to move shit in space than on earth. Basically, you get to stop paying tariffs to our good friends friction and air resistance.
I suppose once you start saying that you're going to mine the galaxy, you've already got some sort of low-cost method of escaping earths atmosphere, a la space elevator, or maybe even anti-gravity.
Anyone here read James Blish's City in the Stars? (I think thats what it was called)
Re:mine WHAT? (Score:1)
You're apparently missing that the aggregate would be used for development on Mars and Luna.
The article reads: "an important resource on both the Moon and Mars", not "from both the Moon and Mars"
I don't know about you, but the second they build the first settlement, I'm findin' me nineteen men and twenty women, renaming my palm pilot's build of Eliza Mike, and hopping on the first ship up.
There are many things more important than shipping the minerals to Earth
Location, Location, Location... (Score:1)
Re:mine WHAT? (Score:2)
Aggregate (Score:2)
Which is exactly why they don't want to use stuff from Earth. These mined materials are going to be used to fabricate items on the Moon and Mars.
Uh. No. Re:mine WHAT? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the costs to LAUNCH is "only" ~$2600/kg. That's $2.6 million/tonne, that's 3 orders of magnitude less than you quoted. And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
But that's launch. There's many reasons to think that space transport is going to be many times cheaper than that- if you use space resources to move around; IN space, rather than getting INTO space, the costs are much, much lower. For one thing, reusable interplanetary craft are pretty trivial to design- fully reusable launch vehicles are harder.
Incidentally, some materials are 'ungodly' expensive. Check out the price of platinum group materials- they run at over $500/ounce.
Oh yeah, BTW the underlying cost of launching something into space are under $10/kg. That's more than the fuel costs. We're a long way from that at the moment- but from my studies, there's a pretty convincing argument that that's mainly because the launch rate is so low right now (the costs are, surprisingly, roughly fixed, and amortise across the amount of launched mass).
I'm expecting the launch cost to go down by atleast 4x in the next ten years, and to do the same in the ten years after that. That will put Space Tourism in the ballpark of a Concorde flight.
$2600 Kg? (Score:2)
And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x
more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
This figure is true regardless of what it costs to launch something. If it costs a dollar to launch something into orbit, it will cost about $10 to produce the thing being launched. The problem is engineering and volume. Say you have a satellite to produce. Its going to cost you $50 Million to launch it and if it broke down on orbit, it would take another launch to replace it. Youre going to be much more willing to spend alot of time and money to make darn sure the satellite will work for 10-15 years than if it cost $500 to launch it. If it cost $500 to launch a satellite, you wouldnt need to worry about station keeping, you wouldnt need to worry about rad hard hardware, you wouldnt need to worry about fault tolerent software. If it breaks, just throw another one up there. The cost of launch and the cost of satellites are linked. Launch costs cannot go down much further with current technology, any more than propeller planes can break the sound barrier. You are limited by the rocket equation. V=-g0*Isp*ln(r) where r is the ratio between the payload mass and the initial mass of the rocket. The best Isp rocket engine we can muster right now is 433 seconds. Until we can beat that and still have enough thrust to get off the ground, the current situation wil remain. We need a propulsion breakthrough, plain and simple.
Re:$2600 Kg? (Score:2)
Russian Proton launcher. Actually if you look closely you'll find that quite a lot of the ISS was lifted there by the Proton. There's a reason for that...
NASA can't use the launcher directly because NASA is mostly a work creation scheme for Americans; so they end up spending orders of magnitude more for services they can get locally. It's nuts but that's politics I guess.
>Launch costs cannot go down much further with current technology, any more than propeller planes can break
>the sound barrier. You are limited by the rocket equation. V=-g0*Isp*ln(r) where r is the ratio between the payload mass and the
>initial mass of the rocket.
Oh so the costs all go into the rocket fuel? Nope. The rocket fuel costs are negligable. The costs to launch go into the armies of people that build, fuel, launch and control the rocket.
Thing is; if the launch rate went up by an order of magnitude, how many more people would you need? Not ten times, more like twice, at most. So the cost per kg would come down by 5 times... (Actually that's partly why the Shuttle is so expensive- it was designed to launch every week- but they weren't able to in the end.)
We don't actually need any new tech. We need to launch more.
Re:$2600 Kg? (Score:2)
Recovering those resources (Score:2)
Of course we could just drop them into the ocean, and then mine them again.
Re:Recovering those resources (Score:1)
You don't. You use these raw materials in space exploration and colonization.
Robotic Mining on Earth Already (Score:2, Interesting)
(Blatant plug, I know!
Where's My 'Ore? (Score:3, Funny)
Ba Dum Bum.
Birth of the Orbital Railgun... (Score:3, Funny)
One of the big, big problems I see with interplanetary mining is the inherent possibilities for danger in the celestial shipment process.
Say you mine an Iron-rich asteroid, and then send the packets of ore back home to earth via a cheap, long-trajectory orbit. How easy would it be to hijack huge chunks of ore from their trajectories and then fire them at the enemy of your choice on the planet with the aid of a rail gun.
I'm not a engineer, but I've seen enough 'build your own railgun' pages out there to know that it would be fairly easy and cheap for any given interplanetary free-lancer to build such a weapon in orbit.
There is also a high probability of space accidents. With all that ore just floating around, someone is bound to hit it sooner or later. Worse, suppose that the mining activities send large-enough chunks of poorly aimed metal-rich debris toward earth? Worse, suppose mining activities affect the orbit of certain Near-Earth Asteroids.
Asteroid and Planetary mining is a very good thing, because it will help save the Earth's environment, provide massive amounts of employment and wealth on Earth. Unfortuneately, there are very serious risks that should be addressed before mining begins.
Not needed... Re:Birth of the Orbital Railgun... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Birth of the Orbital Railgun... (Score:2, Insightful)
Read "Moon is a harsh Mistress" by R.A. Heinlein for a Sci-fi view of this. You folks who are talking about bringing the ore back to earth seem to miss the point - it's better to keep this stuff up in orbit to you can use it instead of bringing it back to Earth. I forget the price per Kilogram of sending something up in the space shuttle, but it's something like $20,000/kg +.
Of course, if you bang an asteroid with a nice meaty chunk of Platinum or Paladium, there's a lot of healthy uses for that back home.
Re:Birth of the Orbital Railgun... (Score:2)
Yes, but the shuttle is ungodly expensive.
The Russians launch for about $2600/kg. Also SeaLaunch (Boeing/Russian collaboration) are about that price too.
Where will the heavy equipment come from? (Score:2, Insightful)
Another question is whether these space resources would be used for construction up there, or sent back here... if sent back here, I can see now the inane claims of Greens that, while we'd be using less of the Earth's own bounty, we'd be dangerously adding mass to the Earth with "unknown consequences"...
Love the earlier reference to Larry Niven... always worth going back and reading his stuff.
Re:Where will the heavy equipment come from? (Score:2, Interesting)
The only things sent back to earth would not be raw materials, but manufactured items that could only be made under 0G.
The rest is for launching missions to other planets, and hopefully other stars. What NASA really needs is a multi-decade(century) plan to colonize the Solar System starting with a self sustaining refuel and refit facility on the moon. Meaning a lunar food, water, oxygen, and fuel source. The next step is to develop manufacturing capability on the moon to use lunar resources to make reusable interplanetary vehicles. Then, do the same on a martian moon. Then, decide if there is any reason to set up facilities on Mars. Why try to launch stuff from Mars if you can get it from a Martian moon? Although developing Mars might be nice for the people to have solid ground under foot, a sky, gravity, etc... Next pick a jovian moon and develop food, fuel, oxygen and water resources. I think Saturn is an important target due to its lower radiation than jupiter, rings full of ice, and many moons.
When the technology is developed, the ideal step is for conglomerations of comets and asteroids to be put in convenient orbits as refueling and refit stations for interplanetary travelers.
The ulitmate goal of all of this is of course an interstellar colonization. Assembling a self-sustaining habitat from asteroids, comets, chunks of saturn ring ice. Outfit it with nuclear reactors and plenty of nuclear fuel and reaction mass. Then send a large group of colonists to another star, hopefully by then we have found planets capable of sustaining human life. A ship of that size, and with the capabilities inherent in building such a ship, should even be able to add additional chunks of ice and asteroids from a star as it looks for a place to set up shop permanently.
Dastardly
Watershed moment in space exploration (Score:3, Insightful)
In Earth's history, voyages of discovery have always taken enough supplies to get them to their destination, then they used indiginous resources to keep going. How far could Columbus (nasty Eurotrash that he was) have kept going if he'd had to get back before his food ran out?
Mining operations in space needn't be self-sufficient to represent a new era in space exploration; they need only become marginally profitable, and we'll be over the hump. The new "New World" will begin to move past the exploration phase, and on to exploitation and settlement. Thank God we aren't carrying smallpox around anymore.
Infrastructure? (Score:2)
Other than that though it completely glazes over this problem. Most of our space travel right now relies on coasting around gravity fields of the sun and planets, and the result this has is that travel takes a really freaking long time. The obvious solution would be to make sure each shipment is worth the wait.. but then you run into the problems of carting an aircraft carrier sized ship around the solar system.
Methods of gathering the resources is a good discussion to be having, but the issue of transportation is a lot more fundamental and will need to be answered first. Us humans gotta develop a way to get between earth/moon/mars with a reasonable timetable and budget before we can seriously debate the idea of mining the solar system.
Of course one could argue that you just use the resources where you mine them and then worry about exporting the products, but that just complicates things.. at that point you not only have to worry about shipping stuff around, you have to worry about building up a full ecology at the remote site.
And let's not forget to consider the words of whatisface in the matrix likening humans to parasites who do nothing but expand and consume.
Re:Infrastructure? (Score:2)
Provided you have enough power (large solar panels or fission reactor) the're slow, but not *that* slow.
Also see VASIMIR; but that needs very much more power, and it isn't clear that the nuclear power plant can be made light enough to make VASIMIR practical- VASIMIR uses a LOT of power.
>Is the solar system just one big resource waiting for us to come take it.. or should we enter the
>ordeal of a mind to preserve something that's been there for billions of years?
The dinosaurs didn't have space flight. They died. Your choice.
What they don't seem to mention (Score:4, Insightful)
It costs quite a bit of money just to put a pound of mass into orbit. Just looking for a quick ballpark, I found http://www.orbit6.com/et/ngfido94.htm [orbit6.com] which asserts:
So it's about US$1.875M to launch one ton of mass into orbit (best case.) Therefore one ton of, say, iron in orbit is worth whatever a ton of iron is worth normally, PLUS some fraction of US$1.875M.
If you're building things for space, the best way to go is to build them IN space, which should cut their cost dramatically. We shouldn't forget about reusing the shuttle's bigass tanks, which NASA says they can do for free, and supposedly will do for anyone who is willing to do something responsible with them. We should be thinking of ways to use those tanks to do something clever WRT space-based mining, because they're cheap. Perhaps one should build some sort of machining facility, and a smelter; Having done that it should be possible to make ISS parts or similar. This would save huge piles of money, because you only have to lift the most specialized components.
Re:What they don't seem to mention (Score:2)
I personally think the tank is a red herring. It may be that NASA won't launch very many more of them anyway- the Space Shuttle design has been outcompeted; it's just a matter of time before Space Shuttle launch vehicles are replaced, alas. Indeed, I think they MUST go, for the good of NASA and the american space industry.
Closer to home... (Score:1)
...is the moon. Now, IIRC, most of the problems with getting a fusion reactor (smashing atoms together) to work are solved by using Helium-3, He-3. But it's rare enough that minute quantities are sold by Us.Gov at fantastically high prices - they get it from old nuclear bombs, because a component (tritium gas) decays into He-3 (tritium has a half-life of aprox. 13 years).
The surface of the moon is rich in He-3.
To hear some tell it, the answer to all our energy problems is strip-mining the surface of the moon...
Re:Closer to home... (Score:2)
Possibly.. But the Wisconsin cheese lobbyists will never stand for it...
Re:Closer to home...fusion information (Score:2, Informative)
Having said that, I work on a fusion experiment. Its configuration is such the deuterium-helium-3 reaction may be required to make a workable reactor, and the notion of mining He-3 from the moon has been a subject of serious discussion
Manifold Time (Score:1)
Savages... (Score:2)
It reminds ME of Niven's Known Space books. Homeworld indeed...
I volunteer to be the first of the Belters.
If you don't have to bring it back (Score:1)
It would be even better if you could _consume_ it on site...
You guys are missing the point... (Score:2, Insightful)
The danger is that this type of system, if it was automated, could easily over-run us.
high school debate rocks (Score:1)
yep, i built super-excellent logical reasoning skills in those years.
mod this up so other debaters can chime in.
Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:4, Informative)
But the counter-counter argument is that the asteroid has something you don't have in your backyard- a continuous supply of mostly free solar energy. Smelting on the earth is enormously expensive. Smelting at an asteroid only needs a big sheet of foil and you can obtain ~5000C.
Solar ovens give 1.6 kw/m^2. That's a lot. On earth solar power is less than 1/6 of that due to weather, oblique angles, atmospheric effects and this phenomena called 'nighttime'. 200 watts isn't much. 1.6kw is getting respectable.
(And no- solar ovens are not hard to build- they don't require any kind of high precision; but they are not used much on earth chiefly because of weather and mounting/pointing issues, in zero gravity this is not an issue.)
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
You neglected one very important fact in your calculations. Yes, there is more solar energy on an asteroid that is near the Earth, but this energy is useless. There's a lot of energy in the core of the Earth too, but that's also useless for the purpose of power generation. There is no convenient method of transporting the energy to a convenient location. (Especially when one considers that the asteroid will soon be many millions of miles from the Earth, even if it is close for a moment.)
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
>that is near the Earth, but this energy is
>useless.
Oh really? So it wouldn't power a mining operation or allow you to extract particular minerals or compounds?
>There is no convenient method of transporting the
>energy to a convenient location.
I think the mine IS a convenient location.
For example, water would be a reasonable thing to mine, and the extraction equipment (distillation!) could certainly use the solar energy. Water is a basic ingredient for very decent rocket fuel, either steam rockets, or LOX/LH.
Right now, 1 tonne of water is worth upto $2.6 million in earth orbit.
And solar energy also is useful to power the trip back...
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Think about cpu's made of cheap gold rather than aluminum, or copper. If the cost of gold is reduced making it possible to improve the energy efficiency of certain devices, then we need to measure it's value in terms of the cost of the energy saved rather than the cost of the raw material..
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Yeah, you become a monopoly supplier, and can control the price. You make lots of money. That's not illegal incidentally.
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Hey, if they can make this pay, it will still drop the price below the current one; more power to them I say. They may have enough money to do it too.
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Granted, launch insurance may be required by law, but there's not much that can go wrong during launch (while you're still far far away from the asteroid). The legal structures do not yet exist for the rest of the mission...so why buy insurance if you don't have to, when you know it'll be overpriced relative to the true risk?
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Uh...no. An accident is an accident, and NOBODY is going to prosecute you if a thruster misfires. Now, if you DELIBERATELY dropped that load on a country...
Re:Asteroids = $$$$$ (Score:2)
Everything after the craft gets to orbit and before it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. Maybe more.
Plus, without insurance on the whole mission, you certainly wouldn't be able to raise the money to get the first rocket up.
Ah...no. You raise the money from those who know it's a risk. Show them that the odds of return on investment show greater results without insurance. Keep in mind: anyone providing insurance will weight the odds in their favor...therefore, to buy insurance is to lower your maximum possible returns, without comparable advantage in case of an accident. Insurance is a sucker's bet, unless you really can't afford to lose (like, say, for house or life insurance - and a rocket is neither of those).
And thats not considering the threats countries would give before launch
Once you have it in Earth orbit, even random chance gives you about a 2/3rds chance of oceanic splashdown. But once you have it in Earth orbit, aiming re-entry is pretty easy relative to the rest of the mission - de-orbits have been done for a long time. Getting it into Earth orbit is the tricky part, but it's easy enough just to aim wide so that, even if the worst happens, the asteroid just scoots on by like so many other near misses we've had over the years.
Poor Editing (Score:2)
I remember on this as well (Score:2)
As well as I. I went to highschool not to long ago, but my school was populated with save the planet wannabes. When it was brought up in class, kids would say stuff like "mining is the worst thing that you can do" or when I talked about strip mining an asteroid it was "do you know what a strip mine does to the eco-system?"
I mean come on how stupid can you be...those statements are about as dumb as one kid who was appalled when we discussed nuclear fission engines in the space shuttle to mars "but what if there is a melt down, think of all the radiation and toxic pollution!!!
Re:I remember on this as well (Score:2)
Now its MRI, people have it done without a qualm.
"A rose by any other name..."
Best Reason for this (Score:2)
Send criminals! (Score:2, Flamebait)
Seriously.. this isn't a troll. It sounds crazy, but as long as we are killing people, we might as well get some use out of them. And I am sure quite a few death row inmates would rather be remembered for helping mankind get to mars than for killing a few people in a convience store robbery.
I don't know.. maybe I just haven't had enough coffee yet this morning.. just an idea.
Re:Send criminals! (Score:2)
Because we don't want Mars to become a space-borne Australia...
*ducks and runs*
Australia (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, the English did this with Australia, which is ironic. I mean, they shipped away all these criminals whose descendants wound up living on an entire continent surrounded with incredible natural beauty, massive resources, and much better weather. I guess punishment is in the eye of the beholder...
Politics and Self Sufficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
But, what about self sufficiency for a space colony? Robinson's Mars series points out how any colony that becomes self sufficient is destained to become its own nation (think of the U.S. colonies in 1776). Extraterretial mining technology would be the first step in that direction.
Most SF on the topic (including Robison) focuses on a revolution scenario, with Earth trying to maintain its grip on the colony in question. On the other hand, skeptics of human space colonization say colonies will never happen beacause they cost too much and will drain resources from Mother Earth over the long term.
What if they're both wrong? Would Earth be willing to front a large, but finite, amount of cash to set up a colony with the understanding that it would one day become an independant political entity and not an ongoing drain on resources? Would immigrants be more willing to join up, and front some of their own capital, with this promise of independance when "the mortgage is paid off"?
The end of money (Score:2)
Re:The end of money (Score:2)
But that isn't going to get rid of money, or working for that matter.
To see that, consider what happens if the cost of producing some item drops to zero- say bread.
It wouldn't actually drop the price to nothing. It would only drop the price down somewhat- you'd still have to pay for the R&D for new sorts of bread, for advertising and so forth.
You could imagine an 'open source' recipe for bread; and that would drop the cost for the open source bread to zero, but I would expect that some sorts of bread wouldn't be open source, and would still sell.
Either way, bakers wouldn't be out of a job, its just that the job would change. Money isn't about paying for things, it's more to do with paying for persons time in fact. Time is money. (Only not exactly- there's also what you can get for an item...)
where there's no will, there's no way (Score:2, Insightful)
The world can barely muster up enough political will and economic support to maintain one space station with three people on it. Even the space station plan has been cut way back from its original scope. You can forget about seeing extensive space mining or any other other kind of major escalation of space efforts as long as the current economics and attitudes prevail.
IMHO, extensive exploration of space will only start happening when it's no longer the governments of the world that are paying for it.
-- Spike
Re:where there's no will, there's no way (Score:2)
>governments of the world that are paying for it.
I think exploration is what the governments are supposed to do.
On the other hand, commercial use of space is going great, already more than 60% of space launches are commercial rather than governmental, and this is driving down the costs to access space; and there's a long way to go on that yet.
Not NASA leading the way (Score:3, Informative)
The posting implies that NASA is leading these studies. Not at all. It's primarily the academic community and non-profits like the Space Studies Institute [ssi.org] and the National Space Society [nss.org]. NASA generally puts its mouth where its money is, and that's the ISS, which does little or nothing to help advance the cause of space development.
Given the very poor ROI of the ISS, who would seriously trust NASA to lead the way on lunar, asteroid and cometary resource exploitation? The best they can do is sponsor science missions so that we can understand what these resources are and where. In fact, they are doing that.
Like any conference, there will be loads of good and not so good ideas presented, but the fundamental logic is the same: it makes no sense to build things in space with materials brought from the ground. There are loads of materials on the moon (and no biosphere to damage) that have the potential to supply a large proportion of a spacefaring civilization. Big question is, do we want to be a spacefaring civilization?
It is not a good idea (Score:2, Insightful)
IF we get in the habit or scrounging up every bit of good minerals/power from everywhere near us, we will leave a trail of trash wherever we go. In 1000 years do we want a string of dead solar systems pointing to us, who now need a galaxy's power for a few star systems?
Bah. We need to learn efficiency.
short term good sucks.
Re:It is not a good idea (Score:2)
Launch costs are still the bottleneck.... (Score:2, Informative)
The cost of launching a payload is the bottleneck for all forms of space exploration, manned or unmanned. Check here [ghg.net] for an interesting read about launch costs. I don't agree with everything the author says, but he raises some salient points.
Asteriod mining, missions to Mars and the outer planets, a return to the Moon - all these are wonderful ideas, but until the cost of a ride to orbit comes down, it's all academic.
The Rape of the Moon (Score:3, Interesting)
Water is far more valuable for being water than for being a source of hydrogen. Mining the ice on the moon for propellant is stupid and short-sighted. The moon has very little water and that water will be needed to support eventual human colonies on the moon.
There is a real danger that missions to the moon in the near future will use the water ice to make propellant and lower their cost. I don't think that wasting this water is a good idea... the Moon is the only water source near Earth that won't cost you hefty launch costs. This lunar water will be valuable to lunar colonies as well as colonies on asteroids and in orbit around the Earth as it will be much easier to get than water from Earth or Mars.
Re:What is wrong with raping the moon? (Score:2)
mars is suited tohuman colonization, surpassing moon in all respects, except for distance.
Interesting fact about the moon and mars. The moon may be closer to the earth, but the amount of delta-v required to go to mars is less than that required to go to the moon. This means that radio signals and astronauts will take longer to get to mars, but they will need less fuel per unit mass to do it.
An interesting corollary is that there is no way to economically make use of the moon as an intermediate stop on the way to mars, even if you had the fuel just sitting there ready to be used at zero cost.
Re:say what??? (Score:2)
I don't know orbital mechanics, but the quoted figures I've seen for this have made that assumption.
Why not? Don't we do aerobraking every time we deorbit the Space Shuttle?
Re:say what??? (Score:2)
Earth Approachers (Score:2)
With enough lead time, we could mine down an Earth approacher until it was small enough to divert.
It's the 10 km comets coming out of nowhere with only months of lead time that are frightening. Of course, by establishing a continuous presence in interplanetary space, this will lead us to develop other technologies that will allow us to destroy asteroid/comet threats in a shorter time frame.
So, I'm all for it. I'd much rather grab methane ice from some space rock than blast the top off a mountain in West Virginia. Of course, I'm sure the environmentalist wackos will figure out some way to make asteroid mining politically incorrect. On the up side, maybe they will chain themselves to the asteroids.
Reminds me of a bumper sticker in college... (Score:2, Funny)
Funny part is I went to the Colo School of Mines - which held the first summit to discuss the econmics of space mining last year.
Economics (Score:3, Insightful)
Another thing is that when/if we establish fully functional mining colonies on the moon, the next stage will be to create the industrial resources there on the moon to construct and launch spacecraft. There's some startup costs getting materials there for the first few spacecraft... but construction and launches should both be much more efficient in a low gravity environment. Those first ships can then hopefully lead to cheaper mining elsewhere (Mars?) for raw materials to build more in space, leading to progressively less and less launches from Earth.
Read the book, "Mining the Sky" (Score:2, Informative)
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201
Re:I wonder how heavy it would make our planet (Score:2)
They were so concerned about the planetary mass erosion caused by countless tourists that you had to "get receipts" when you used the lavatory, and any difference between what you brought/took away was "surgically removed" from your body. q:]
Hope it wouldn't come to that, but in large enough scales, it definately would be a concern.
MadCow.