A need for asteroid mining?

[neutrino78x]

Neutrino78x,

For a number of reasons, I am convinced that, eventually, all heavy, energy intensive, dirty industries will be based off planet. However, I envision the process taking a minimum of 100 years to completion, possibly longer. Right now, the cost of making something in space is nearly beyond measure. Our methods of accessing space are primitive, our technologies for surviving there in their infancy. But all of that will change, I am certain, as industry discovers the cost benefits of working outside our ecosystem.

Well sure, if you put it 100 years in the future, after we have all this infrastructure developed, I can only agree that it would be plausible at that point.

However, I would also add that 100 years from now, we will probably have advanced greatly the engineering process of extracting things from the ground.

The key word here, though, is industry. NASA is not the entity that would mine asteroids, any more than the Navy is the entity that mines deep sea oil and natural gas. Kerr McGee mines the deep sea, and Chevron ships transport the oil. The Navy doesn't make the oil platforms or the ships. If pirates attack the ships, the Navy will come to defend them. That's the government's role in all this.

The work involved in heating our homes and workplaces, and transporting people between their homes and work or school will soak up a great deal of the carbon allowances everyone will have to deal with if a sizable portion of the world's population achieves a standard of living anywhere near that of the United States.

True, if the current status quo continues, but why wouldn't developing countries use nuclear and renewable for their power, batteries for small cars, and hydrogen for bigger vehicles? The Green Economy is a big growth area right now. Sure, Africa could power everything with coal, but it seems illogical, given the abundance of sunshine. If I lived in Africa, I would have PV on the roof, and store power with batteries for the night. PV won't power industry, but that's where solar thermal, wind, and nuclear come in.

Dropping finished, or ready to assemble, goods into the atmosphere is almost free, apart from the container, heat shield, and parachutes, and that is importing energy into the ecosystem in the form of products which need no more energy intensive processing.

Yeah, that's true. I'm sure it will be a big part of the picture in the far future.

The two examples of ships you used are actually appropriate. The Enterprise is a starship, with Faster Than Light drive, power generation potential in the terawatt range, I would imagine, and capable of traveling from Earth to Jupiter in minutes. The Discovery is a primitive, fission powered vehicle, which requires several months to travel from Earth to Jupiter. But it is advanced enough to provide its crew with quarters under spin, to avoid muscle atrophy.

Yeah but halman, we are no where near to the point where we can build something like the Discovery. We can build Mars Direct capsules now.

I realize that there are people who are more than willing to travel to Mars in an Apollo capsule, just as there have been people willing to travel from Cuba to the US on open rafts. But just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done. A mission to Mars resulting in the loss of the crew could have very negative effects on our entire space exploration program at this early stage.

Well you risk your life whenever you go into space. Just like the current sailors in the present day Navy risk their lives when they go to sea. Especially those of us who served on submarines (although surface sailors would disagree with me of course lol).

But the Mars Direct capsules actually have more privacy than we do on submarines. These are Mars Direct capsules

Note the staterooms. Everybody gets their own. The only person on a submarine with that much privacy is the Captain! and even he shares the bathroom with the XO (2nd in Command).

This is where enlisted men sleep on a Trident submarine. Attack subs have even less room (on an attack sub, you share your bed with 2 other sailors; when 2 guys are awake, the 3rd is asleep, and they rotate).

Once we have established ourselves in space in terms of industry, there will be no turning back, And industrial development offers the greatest opportunity for the investment needed to develop and perfect our technology for existing outside of our fragile ecosphere.

Yeah, but that is for industry to develop. If there are to be government endorsed colonies, of which Jamestown was one, the place to do that would be Mars, where there is an atmosphere, abundant water, natural gravity, and lots of natural real estate.

 

[Shpaget]

Question:
Is there a (relatively) reliable engine that can burn rock and other material from nickel iron asteroids?
Possibly ground and pulverized rocks evaporated by solar array or nuclear power?
That would give high specific impulse and you would be able to use large quantities of fuel (more the better).

 

[nimbus]

A new Stone Age!

 

[halman]

Booban wrote:

"There is plenty of room left to keep on polluting the planet and even if we get space mining going, I don't think that will stop African from polluting their countries as they industrialized and look for profits.

I actually do think the human species is so stupid that our short sighted selfishness will eventually kill us. I wonder if its very wise waiting for pollution regulations to send us to space."

There are many people who would disagree that we have plenty of room left to pollute the Earth. They are of the belief that we can reach a tipping point at any time, which would result in large scale effects. I am not interested in a debate over the consequences of pollution, what I am after is way to popularize space flight with people who tend to view technology as evil, primarily because of the greed that has pushed for implementing technology without incorporating known safeguards.

I consider it to be very important to develop widespread support for space exploration, which means reaching beyond those who want to move to Mars right now. Environmental degradation and business opportunities are the only thing that I have come up with so far, basically because they appeal to large segments of the population. I do not want to create the perception that the ONLY reason for space exploration is so that we can build a colony on Mars.

 

[SpaceForAReason]

Why do we assume asteroids have better minerals than the moon?

 

[Booban]

I didn't mean that we can continue to pollute more, only that there are countries that have yet to industrialized and will pollute more. I think there is evidence that we have already tipped to the scale and climate change is unavoidable and irreversible now.

You are correct about the perception about space exploration, but that is the reason that is always given. We are in space to colonize, specifically Mars. I think this is silly, no wonder no one supports space. Nobody lives in the desert or arctic because it is inhospitable, Mars is worse. But then they become like some weird religious cult proclaiming the end of the world is near.

Nobody believes me but I am a fan of space, but people are just laughing at us if we keep talking like that aloud.

So you're right, business opportunities is where it is at. If it can be helped along with some kind of environment tax, I would be so happy, specially environment import tax.

But its actually enough if NASA just took a more business-like attitude to space and had a small list of projects that are to test some business cases out in space, even if they don't pan out. It should not have been Russia for example that sent the first and all there after?) tourist to space.

 

[neutrino78x]

Well, in my opinion, the three main reasons for space exploration, in order of importance, are survival, economic expansion (another economic frontier), and exploration for its own sake.

I think Mars is the logical next home for humanity, but it would certainly not be the last, and there is certainly nothing to stop people from mining asteroids along the way.

Private companies can and should do things like mine asteroids without funding from the government. I would not expect the government to fund Mars colonies in all cases. I would expect it to be like the 1700s: the government lands there, the military officer says "I claim this land for the United States of America" and then people can homestead in, say, 1000 square kilometers and be under the US Flag, protected by the US military and having the rights enshrined in the US Constitution. It would be US soil, in other words.

Another military officer would land in another area of Mars and say "I claim this land for the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland," etc.

Why do you guys speak of "privatization" as if, in the future, there will be no presence in space which is not funded by the government? Bigeolow's planned space station will be built with private funds, will it not? I certainly wouldn't want the government to be paying for that. If you want the future depicted in Star Wars or Star Trek, there have to be private actors doing those things. You have to be able to get colonies in which most people are not government employees.

--Brian

 

[kelvinzero]

Why do we assume asteroids have better minerals than the moon?

We know a fair bit about the composition of both. We have sent a number of manned and unmanned missions to the moon. Im not sure of all the ways that we know about the composition of the asteroids, but one way of course would be analyzing meteorites that have fallen to earth.

 

[EarthlingX]

Why do we assume asteroids have better minerals than the moon?

We assume they have smaller deltaV requirement than Moon, there's a LOT of NEOs, a lot of places to go to find out composition for a fact, but there are signs, like albedo, that hint on what's there.
If those hints are correct, there is a xilions of potential €, $, ...

 

[EarthlingX]

Here is an example of asteroid, that is further away, but just got some veil lifted from it's composition:
(Ice confirmed on an asteroid)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... n_asteroid

 

[scottb50]

As far as I know, Earth is the planet with highest density (higher than Mercury or Venus).

Also from Wiki (so I haven't verified)

All measures in grams per cubic centimeter (g/cm3):

•Mercury - 5.427
•Venus - 5.204
•Earth - 5.515
•Mars - 3.934
•Jupiter - 1.326
•Saturn - 0.687
•Uranus - 1.27
•Neptune - 1.638

I stand corrected. I would think the organic upper layer of Earth and the atmosphere we have could make a difference. My point was more the heavier materials would have come into existence earlier and while they propagated outward they would be involved with more chances of becoming swept up into a Planet along the way.

I would bet Mercury has an abundance of heavy metals, Venus less, but more then Earth, Earth and Mars even less and the outer Planets cores much less, except they were in the outer reaches of the Solar system where all the gasses and liquids were, so a modest core could attract a lot of attention and basically a huge atmosphere.

 

[Shpaget]

Well, it still doesn't mean that asteroid mining is not feasible.
There are asteroids in lower orbit than Earth (making them likely, by your calculations, to have heavier elements).

 

[halman]

I am not quite sure I understand the difference between regular density and 'bulk density', but here is a table prepared by a geologist at the University of Oregon. This supports what I have read recently about Mercury being an excellent candidate for finding heavy metals. Mercury is also where energy for processing would be QUITE abundant, and using light sails to haul product up the gravity well would be easy. But then, the energy cost of getting to Mercury is almost as high as getting to many Near Earth Objects, so we may put off visiting that charming world for a bit longer.

http://geophysics.ou.edu/solid_earth/no ... #densities

Once the mass and radius of a planet are determined, bulk density can be estimated:
Planet r (kg/m3) ru (kg/m3)
Mercury 5420 5300
Venus 5250 3900
Earth 5520 4000
(Moon) 3340 3340
Mars 3940 3700
(Asteroids) 3710 3710
Jupiter 1310 N.A.
Saturn 690 N.A.
Uranus 1190 N.A.
Neptune 1660 N.A.
Pluto 2080(?) ?

(ru equals uncompressed density.)

 

[MeteorWayne]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_density

Bulk density is a property of powders, granules and other "divided" solids, especially used in reference to soil. It is defined as the mass of many particles of the material divided by the total volume they occupy. The total volume includes particle volume, inter-particle void volume and internal pore volume.

The bulk density of soil is inversely related to the porosity of the same soil. The more pore space in a soil the lower the value for bulk density.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density

The density of a material is defined as its mass per unit volume. The symbol of density is ρ (the Greek letter rho).

The formula is the same for both:

rho=M/V (Mass/Volume)

In the page you linked, rho(u) is the uncompressed density, not sure how that is defined or calculated. The page doesn't make it clear.

 

[halman]

Yeah, you are right. And what has it got to do with asteroid mining, anyway? The whole question of mining asteroids has become much more immediate after the Agustine panel summary was released, primarily because targeting Near Earth Objects for initial exploration would save the costs of developing landers and habitat for use on planetary surfaces, while providing an incentive to develop long-duration life-support systems. This would be a way to finance the creation of the spacecraft which will be the workhorse of the later part of the century, when our efforts move further afield.

 

[SpaceForAReason]

For mining I would prefer the moon first because any gravity at all will help long-duration missions and operations.

People do better in the presence of gravity. We humans are more accustomed to being productive in a gravity field. We know what kind of equipment is necessary in a gravity field. I don't even have a clue how or what they would use in zero gee. It would certainly have to be a very delicate and time-consuming operation; especially if the asteroid is loosely packed (dangerous!). And what would you do with all the floating slag? (That is even more dangerous!!) Containment would cost a fortune. For us to produce anything in great quantities we are better off with something we already know: Gravity.

For the moon, many ideas have been tossed about to make it easier. Rail Guns (expensive) and Sling Shots (cheaper) sounded pretty nifty. even modest boosts to lunar orbit can make it more feasable. Also, proximity to earth means frequent communication, closer life-line in emergencies, and easier access to Earth. Communication and return from asteroids can be tricky if earth is not in the neighborhood.

The moon may be gravitationally more expensive, but I suspect that asteroid mining would beat that cost in other ways.