CodeRedR51
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Asteroid Mining?
- Thread starter CodeRedR51
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Asteroid mining may be technically feasible(although there is a huge difference between saying and getting the trillions of dollars in rare ores in asteroids), the problem with that would be the market. It's simply not there yet.
Space manufacturing and space economy must be further developed in order to create the need for such materials out of the earth's gravitational well.
Space manufacturing and space economy must be further developed in order to create the need for such materials out of the earth's gravitational well.
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- astrosdude91
Didn't we already do that back in 1998?
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- HamiltonMP427
Didn't we already do that back in 1998?
No that was us venturing into the asteroid demolition market, which economically flopped
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I think they've been playing too much EVE Online.
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well what about 2008?No that was us venturing into the asteroid demolition market, which economically flopped
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Largely because it landed like a particularly bad aeroplane. The Orbiter also couldn't get to an asteroid unless it was 300 miles above the planet. It wasn't designed for that - it was designed to get seven guys and a satellite up and down, repeatedly.
This wouldn't be a manned operation. You'd "just" need to send up a drilling rig and some return pods - maybe a "command unit" too. Have the command unit orbit the asteroid, land the rig onto it and fill the return pods with product. Send the return pods up (minimal gravity = minimal fuel load) to the CU, it fires them home. How and where they land back on Earth isn't even relevant - you could even just smash them into the ground and scoop up the ore - but you can parachute them down with a couple hundred tons a pop if you feel like it. Every few months, launch a new bunch of pods toward the CU. When the asteroid is mined, the rig is launched back to the CU and move onto the next. It's all "just" a matter of math and trajectories.
In fact the only real problem is launching the stuff from Earth. That's an expensive business. It'd be much better if it could be launched from the Moon or from orbit. Anyone seen Newt Gingrich lately?
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Or, we could just harvest helium-3 on the Moon, and screw all that.
Danoff
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Yup, pretty much correct. Fire lumps of ore back to earth as you collect them (might want to affix a heat shield so that some of it manages to get to the surface, probably don't need pods). If you're really doing it right, you're manufacturing the heat shields on the asteroid itself. Ore re-enters earth like an meteor, you go find it where it lands. Retro-rockets would be an alternative to just slamming into the ground at terminal velocity.
I actually had the idea to use springs to launch the ore from the asteroid. Not going to shove the asteroid too much, and the springs can be reloaded. Asteroid gravity is generally microscopic. An object would take minutes to hit the ground if you dropped it.
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Que space theme
I keep thinking about Cowboy Bebop every time I hear about this over the past two weeks.
I keep thinking about Cowboy Bebop every time I hear about this over the past two weeks.
ExigeEvan
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I realise the Shuttle was a whole load of compromises that couldn't all be justified, but it's payload was simply for reference. The critical bit being a mining truck can get 500 grams of gold for 225 tonnes. And due to the nature of the mining you may find only 1 in 6 trucks has gold in it. (Example from Super Pit, Kalgoorlie, WA, Aus).
So even at a couple of hundred tonnes a load, you need an exceptionally high yield rate and a heck of a lot of loads as well.
Jubby
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I see the potential point, but wouldn't it flood the market? They're thinking that platinum is $1,000/oz, and they can get from one asteroid the same amount that is mined in a year. Doesn't supply and demand mean that it'll get cheaper? Or is that the point?
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Yeah, but that's gold. Gold does nothing [/cross-thread punnery].
Asteroid mining would be for some of the asteroid-specific minerals that are either really rare and hard to mine here or just about completely absent from the planet and only the result of asteroid strikes. I'm thinking at least platinum and iridium, if not osmium, palladium and rhodium*. Expensive, rare and useful as - but three to five orders of magnitude more common in asteroids than the planet.
Plus there's no need for selectivity. Chew the crap out of that hunk of rock, spew it at a "landing" site and sort out what's worthwhile on the surface. Even if you're sending up 50-100kg of pods or heatshields, you're getting thousands of tons back. You'd need a thousand tonnes of Earth rocks to get a gram of iridium, but only one tonne of asteroid to get the same. 1,000 tons of asteroid and you get a kilogram of iridium - and since iridium is commonly alloyed with osmium (osmiridium/iridosmium), a reasonable amount of osmium too. No tunnelling to veins of mineral - cut that puppy to pieces and fire it back at the planet.
* Edit: Actually, they're the platinoids now I come to think of it, plus Ruthenium. Go asteroids
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We've got that relatively well cracked, but no. Mars has just about no atmosphere and Venus has just about the least helpful atmosphere possible - a runaway greenhouse effect composed of 95% carbon dioxide and small proportions of nitrogen, sulphur dioxide, neon, helium and hydrogen fluoride at 90 atmospheres of pressure.
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Venus's CO2 could come in handy, since you can make petrol using solar power and air (which is only ~400 ppm CO2 presently)... I'm guessing that it didn't turn out to be very cost-effective though, given that this show aired a few years ago, and not much has been heard of it since.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILGK5X116SU#t=51m10s
If you could go a bit further afield, Titan (Saturn's moon) has abundant liquid methane.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILGK5X116SU#t=51m10s
If you could go a bit further afield, Titan (Saturn's moon) has abundant liquid methane.
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Danoff
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Anyway, bottom line it is feasible. But it's not like it's easy. The major trick is finding the right asteroid, and getting the material from that asteroid back to earth. Landing on an asteroid and chewing it up doesn't seem that challenging.
You need an asteroid that's rich in minerals that you want (on the surface anyway). But that's not all, you need that asteroid to come near the earth so that you don't have to propel HUGE quantities of rock very far. Also, better get that trajectory right. If all you do is slap a heat shield on a rock and fire it at earth, you have no opportunity for course correction. Get the math wrong and you either miss your target and launch a billion dollars into space, or you land on a city.
You need an asteroid that's rich in minerals that you want (on the surface anyway). But that's not all, you need that asteroid to come near the earth so that you don't have to propel HUGE quantities of rock very far. Also, better get that trajectory right. If all you do is slap a heat shield on a rock and fire it at earth, you have no opportunity for course correction. Get the math wrong and you either miss your target and launch a billion dollars into space, or you land on a city.
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Okay so is the group American? Once and or if they get said resources who gets what per say, I mean this is a new field that doesn't have the limitation of borders or protection if you will. Also how do they plan to decide which celestial bodies (asteroids) to mine on? So they sell the resources back to the investors and the investors sell them to those who want it? I'm just not understanding the market on this type of venture.
I'm just seeing a lot of talk but not so many details even from the article or I may just be reading the stories too fast.
I'm just seeing a lot of talk but not so many details even from the article or I may just be reading the stories too fast.
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It'd take massive, massive amounts I suspect. Gravity is a relatively weak force.
One thing that I don't think has been noted in this thread yet (though may have been covered in one of the links) is that although asteroid mining is an expensive pursuit, it may actually be the more favorable long-term plan.
I think some of the motivation is that of the elements in line to be mined, the same elements on Earth are currently virtually all mined in China. China isn't particularly politically stable, and isn't really an ally of the west... so just as trying to wean the west of middle-eastern oil is a good thing, getting our elements from somewhere other than a global superpower is also a good thing.
The cost is high, but it's better than the economy collapsing should China suddenly decide to curtail its exports...
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Last I heard China had plans to do such and limit to a great degree resources like lithium and others. So the West must look at places like Afghanistan where they're claimed to be sitting on a massive resource mound that could create billions for that nation. Thus I agree with you the ease (politically) to do this instead will help over the long run.
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Yeah, but that's gold. Gold does nothing [/cross-thread punnery].
* Enormous list of rare minerals that no one really knows about *
* Edit: Actually, they're the platinoids now I come to think of it, plus Ruthenium. Go asteroids
Now that I come to think of it, wouldn't ice water in huge quantities justify an operation like that alone?
Water ice can be manufactured into rocket propellant, can be used as radiation shielding and is absolutely vital for any human BEO exploration ambitions. Having all that stuff in a depot on a lagrangian point would greatly increase the scope and possibilities for space exploration.
Are there any icy asteroids around Earth's neighborhood?
