BTW I am not an expert precisely but after what i have learned playing Orbiter and KSP
i am rather skeptic about space mining. At least while we have not some new propulsion technology to make it profitable.
New technology will help, but more important to success of any mining venture is driving down the price of access to space using current technologies. What we currently have could handily do the job of getting back and forth it's just ungodly expensive due to a lot of factors that are unrelated to the actual physics of doing the job. There are a lot of, hmm, how do I say this, anti-market forces that artificially inflate the cost of current rockets.
So how much would cost to mine an asteroid a kilometer wide entirely? Does this guy how huge such asteroid is? How many missions would be needed? How much time? Uncountable i guess, the cost being much higher than a $300 billion to $5.4 trillion profit. For instance, the Apollo program (going six times to the moon) cost was about 100 billions...
I wouldn't know the exact figure but there's no way it's that high, especially since we have the tech to do most of the mining remotely. You also don't need a whole lot of bulky expensive equipment to do it either. Without gravity and air pressure, you can make machines much lighter than their earth equivalents and the fact that there would be no humans around and no environment to pollute means you can do a lot of things you couldn't get away with on Earth that make the whole process cheaper.
We need more momentum from the general public and through crowdsourcing efforts. Most of my time is spent being a biology researcher, so I am certainly trying to focus my volunteer efforts there, too. But, crowdsourcing would be a big boost to these efforts.
There is a bit of crowdsourcing going on. I have no idea how much or if it's enough, but I know it exists. I know it exists because there was actually a thread on it that dommy3k spammed out about how evil government funded space exploration is because he can't read.
They go on and on about water, so it must be pretty important.
No crazy speculation though. That's what this thread is for
Wonder what they plan on using as a power source if they are going to try to make stuff in space for other space ventures? Solar power just isn't strong enough to do real mining work.
Water is crucial as it is rocket fuel. Any given rocket system consists mostly of fuel because you need a lot of fuel to move a given mass someplace and then you need more fuel to move the mass of the fuel you are using to move the rest of the space craft. It gets out of hand pretty quickly and having a handy source of fuel on the other end cuts the requirement in half (roughly) which is a huge deal.
Solar panels that are in use around ~1AU would be fine for mining an asteroid. There is no atmosphere or (necessarily) a night cycle to interfere with them. They can actually get quite a bit of juice in orbit.
Meh, I'm sure that a crapload of solar panels is still better than bringing a nuclear reactor with it.
A nuclear reactor would be bulky but it would be very handy farther than 1AU where the bulk of all the extra panels necessary due to the dimmer sun would actually have more mass. Plus a nuke reactor can provide constant, steady power wherever it's used, even in shadow or under the surface.
Well, yes. Water could be used. Still we should develop a complex hydrogen "micro-economy" in the asteroid, a station capable of searching for water and obtain hydrogen (which is not an easy not energetically cheap) another one for mining and extract the metals (which is even more complex and would imply heavy machinery since you need to process tons of rocks), another cargo ship system to bring the extracted metals back to earth... Meanwhile we currently struggle to land a little vehicle on mars.
Energy is not really a problem due to the ubiquity of solar radiation in space, as I spoke about before. I would argue that machinery needed to process and extract metals from an asteroid are much lighter and simpler than machinery needed for the same job on Earth as I stated above. Also Rules against dumping, mountain top removal and all sorts of other stuff don't apply so you can do all kinds of things you simply can't due here to due to safety and environmental regulations.
As far as getting the material back, all you really need is a very simple, single use rocket engine fueled with LOX/H2. You could make the rest of the vehicle out of processed asteroid rock that has been sintered together with concentrated sunlight. You are going to have tons of it crushed and sorted anyways, why not just use it? That way the only thing you have to bring with you to bring the shipment of metals back the engine and navigation equipment. You could even conceivably aim it for a large patch of desert and use a heatshield made out of asteroidal material bring it through the atmosphere, thus negating the need to 'catch' the cargo in orbit.
Sorry, but IMO all those things would require a really huge bunch of money and technological advances we think we already have but in practice we have not and wont have in maaaany years. So i see all this as sci-fi stories only.
The two current asteroid mining companies and the private rocket companies that are vying to sell them rockets disagree with you. Much of this stuff is understood and has been studied for decades and can be done with largely off-the-shelf tech. It's happening
right now after all.
As for the argument I alluded to earlier that Winner likes to talk about, it's basically bunk IMO. (IIRC) He argues that basically mining asteroids is pointless as far as trying to get the minerals back to Earth. He argues it should only be done in order to make materials available for use in space, in fact, that economically it can only be used in space. He posits that launch costs are so high that sending up all the equipment into space to mine an asteroid(s) is prohibitively expensive and would result in getting ores that cannot be sold at a high enough price to offset the price of the venture. Thus, he says we should mine asteroids, but only so that we can use those materials to build space colonies as it would be even more expensive to send out the materials to build the colonies than it would be to send out machines to extract the materials.
He basically assumes a few things and runs with it:
*Launch prices will remain astronomically expensive
*Asteroid mining tech is and will always be astronomically expensive
*Precious metal prices will not continue to rise even though it's becoming harder and more expensive to mine them here on Earth every day
All of those are flawed assumptions in my opinion. I normally wouldn't summarize his arguments for him but it appears he's ragequitted this thread over our little tussle months back and his argument is certainly pertinent to this discussion and it's isn't terrible - I just disagree with him.
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So it appears NASA really does plan to wrangle an asteroid!
Administration confirms NASA plan: Grab an asteroid, then focus on Mars
NASA's accelerated vision for exploration calls for moving a near-Earth asteroid even nearer to Earth, sending out astronauts to bring back samples within a decade, and then shifting the focus to Mars, a senior Obama administration official told NBC News on Saturday.
The official said the mission would "accomplish the president's challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-effective and potentially quicker time frame than under other scenarios." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to discuss the plan publicly.
The source said more than $100 million would be sought for the mission and other asteroid-related activities in its budget request for the coming fiscal year, which is due to be sent to Congress on Wednesday. That confirms comments made on Friday by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a one-time spaceflier who is now chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science and Space. It also confirms a report about the mission that appeared last month in Aviation Week.
The asteroid retrieval mission is based on a scenario set out last year by a study group at the Keck Institute for Space Studies. NASA's revised scenario would launch a robotic probe toward a 500-ton, 7- to 10-meter-wide (25- to 33-foot-wide) asteroid in 2017 or so. The probe would capture the space rock in a bag in 2019, and then pull it to a stable orbit in the vicinity of the moon, using a next-generation solar electric propulsion system. That would reduce the travel time for asteroid-bound astronauts from a matter of months to just a few days.
The Keck study estimated the total mission cost at $2.6 billion — but the administration official said the price tag could be reduced to $1 billion, or roughly $100 million a year, if the mission took advantage of an already-planned test flight for NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew exploration vehicle. That flight would send astronauts around the moon and back in 2021.
"This mission would combine the best of NASA's asteroid identification, technology development, and human exploration efforts to capture and redirect a small asteroid to just beyond the moon to set up a human mission using existing resources and equipment, including the heavy-lift rocket and deep-space capsule that have been under development for several years," the official said in an email.
The 2014 budget would set aside $78 million for planning the asteroid retrieval mission, plus $27 million to accelerate NASA's efforts to detect and characterize potentially hazardous asteroids. The federal government currently spends $20 million annually on asteroid detection.
Meteor sparked action
The official said the plan had been under discussion for months, but coalesced after February's meteor blast over Russia. The meteor's breakup injured more than 1,000 people and sparked a worldwide sensation. It also sparked a series of congressional hearings about threats from space, during which Republicans as well as Democrats hinted that they would support more funding to counter asteroid threats.
"This plan would help us prove we're smarter than the dinosaurs," said the official, referring to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and many other species 65 million years ago. An asteroid in the 7- to 10-meter range would be about half as wide as the one that broke up over Russia. That's far too small to pose any threat to Earth, even if the space rock was coming directly at our planet. But the captured asteroid could provide valuable insights for dealing with bigger ones in the future.
Initial preparations for the mission won't have to wait for a deal to end budget sequestration, or approval of the budget for the 2014 fiscal year. NASA would begin immediately to identify the asteroid for retrieval, and take advantage of existing efforts funded by the agency's science, technology and human exploration directorates. The most expensive element of the plan, the multibillion-dollar Orion/SLS launch system, is already being funded under the terms of an agreement with Congress.
Discussions with NASA's international and commercial partners will continue in the months and years ahead, the official said. The retrieved asteroid could conceivably become a target for other scientific missions or asteroid-mining operations. In the process, governments might have to address issues surrounding the ownership and exploitation of space resources.
"We're trying to force the question," the official said. "We're trying to push the envelope on this new frontier."
Questions raised
Some observers have already raised questions about the plan, based on the advance reports. Scott Pace, the director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, told The Associated Press that it was a bad idea on scientific as well as diplomatic grounds. It would be better for the United States to join forces with other countries to conduct a comprehensive survey of all potentially dangerous asteroids, Pace said.
Rick Tumlinson, chairman of an asteroid-mining venture called Deep Space Industries, said he was concerned that NASA's asteroid mission might interfere with private-sector efforts — and he called on NASA to rely on private enterprise wherever possible. The administration official assured NBC News that cooperation with commercial ventures as well as other groups such as the B612 Foundation was part of the plan.
The official noted that the mission would provide a relatively low-cost route to satisfying President Barack Obama's goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. The lessons learned during the mission could be applied to future missions aimed at diverting other asteroids — perhaps to head off a potential threat, or conduct further scientific study, or exploit the potentially valuable resources that asteroids contain.
After the asteroid mission, NASA would turn its attention to a farther-out destination: Mars. The Obama administration has called for astronauts to travel to the Red Planet and its moons by the mid-2030s, and that would be the next major target for space exploration. The administration official told NBC News that other concepts, such as sending astronauts back to the moon or creating a deep-space platform beyond the far side of the moon, are not on the agenda for the foreseeable future.
Well, it seems they are serious and that funds *may* be there to get it done. We'll have to see though. It is interesting in that they are doing this precisely because it's cheaper than the current plan to send astronauts out in deep space to get to the asteroid. Who'da thunk it was cheaper to bring the asteroid here?
