The Astronomy Thread

hodj_sl said:

I was thinking more about using controlled detonations to get them moving, then using machines and the Earth's gravitational forces to pull them into an orbital position once they arrive in the vicinity.

Otherwise we're going to be making really expensive trips back and forth from Earth to the Asteroid belt to bring back a fraction of the minerals at many times greater cost. I just don't see how its possible without bringing them back to near Earth orbit and then stripping them clean of minerals. At least not in any way that would make engaging in the activity profitable enough to warrant doing it in the first place.

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Most companies currently plan on mining near earth asteroids in place and only want to transport the extracted materials. Deep Space Industries, for example, wants to use drones and drilling rigs coupled with on-site processing. Others like Planetary Resources and Excalibur Explorations are looking at both drones and chemically extractive methods. The key for the latter two is properly surveying a candidate asteroid that's amenable to their chosen process. Once the ore(s) have been extracted they'll be flown back to earth for use. Given then size of the payloads, most companies are planning on multi-year timelines for the material to get back. The asteroids will actually be closer to the earth than the moon is at times, but that's a lot of material that needs to be moved.

The only ones suggesting that an asteroid be brought back to Earth are some people in the government and a few at NASA. They're relying on theCal-Tech KISS Study, but most of the private industry thinks that in-situ/on the spot mining is the way to go.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Mine and refine the ore in place and ship back just the end product.

Why the big focus on asteroid mining though? They are few and far between and most of them are far away or in weird orbits that would make them hard to get to which I would think would preclude them from any commercial value.

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What else would be good to mine though? Mercury is tiny even if you had some magic tech to mine it. Venus is covered in boiling gas. Earth is us. Mars, from what I understand, is relatively metal-poor and could probably serve a better use by not being swiss cheesed. Next stop is asteroids until you get to the moons of the gas giants -- which are also pretty small.

Seems like if you're gonna mine anything it's gonna be asteroids or Mars. Probably easier to build some behemoth of a ship to belly up on an asteroid and suck it dry than it'd be to establish enough presence on mars to drill 20 miles into the planet.

But I seriously don't know shit about fuck. Just seems like.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Um you might want to read up on physics and orbital mechanics and probably asteroids as well if you think were going to be hauling in 1.6 trillion dollar nuggets.

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Do tell why we won't be hauling "them" in. Be specific about which objects you're talking about, and the physics and orbital mechanics that precludes them being "hauled".

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Why the big focus on asteroid mining though? They are few and far between and most of them are far away or in weird orbits that would make them hard to get to which I would think would preclude them from any commercial value.

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What the fuck are you even talking about? Even amongst near earth asteroids, there's thousands upon thousands of them of varying sizes. There's nearly a thousand of them that are over a kilometer across. And again, that's just NEA's. There's millions of them in the main asteroid belt. And millions more Trojans that are following the other planets in the solar system.

The problem with bringing them in Earth's orbit is getting approval for something like that. An asteroid 1 km across would pretty much wipe a continent and I think that's better than hitting the middle of the ocean.

Sad times when you end up wishing for the USSR to still be around as another competitor in the space race.

Private industry is actually a lot further than most of the public is aware when we're talking about asteroid mining. The biggest problem right now is the funding. There are three main mining companies that are each trying different approaches in monetizing the asteroids. The biggest problem right now is funding which might soon change. Planetary Resources is launching scores of miniature telescopes which it hopes to sell time on to fund their asteroid projects. Also, Planetary Resources has officially partnered with Bechtel to do this, and Google's founders are also heavily invested. Bechtel is the engineering company that built the Hoover Dam. PR's main focus on monetizing asteroids is to hunt for water/ice and use it to make fuel in space. Right now it is horribly inefficient to launch fuel into space, and that's why there's such an extreme interest in high efficiency ion engines. PR hopes to be the Exxon of space. If a lot of fuel were made readily available in space you'd see a feed-back cycle where larger and larger rockets could be used to travel back and forth from other sources of ice and the supply would snowball from there.

Deep Space Industries is focusing on Zero-G manufacturing. It hopes to harvest resources and process them for use in 3d printers in space. They're basically hoping to open up the manufacturing side of things. Last I heard, they were focusing on patents for Zero-G smelting and metals refining.

Lastly, Excalibur Explorations holds several patents on some tethering technologies and some very novel processes for harvesting certain metals off of very specific candidates asteroids already identified. EE's main focus is on Nickel because other precious metals would crash the world market if brought back in "economic quantities." Nickel has enough of a demand that 100K-200K tons of the metal would not appreciably depress the price but still clear several billion dollars.

All three of these companies already possess the technology necessary to do most of the work. It's just an issue of funding and further development. This is overly optimistic, but DSI and EE hope to see their first launches by late 2017. The biggest problems aside from funding is that there are some seriously stupid legal issues from an international standpoint, but like any good pioneers they're probably going to ignore the treaty problems.

Neil Tyson on one of his recent podcasts talked about asteroid mining. And one of the things he was saying would be a good idea would be to set them up as refueling stations for missions to Mars and other places. Given most asteroids are made up of a lot of water they could procure rocket fuel that way while also mining the heavy metals out of them as well.

1) Putting things in orbit around the earth is all fun and games when said things are very very very unlikely to cause significant damage if all fails. The bigger the asteroid, the bigger the risk, so I suspect 'too big' as far as risk is concerned is a lot smaller than what would be deemed 'profitable' by using this technique.

2) Supply an demand. The reason why the mineral content in asteroid is worth a lot of money is because we can't get it as of yet: it is not part of the supply As soon as we can access it: the price plummets.

If I had eggs I would but them in a the 'recycling' basket rather than in the 'asteroid mining' basket.