So..James Cameron and a bunch of other billionaires are going to go get asteroids, mine them and usher in humanity's golden age.

Apparently, anyway.

http://www.planetaryresources.com/

That's their website. They reckon they'll have a satellite launched within 2 years, the satellite will be looking for the right sorta asteroid to go a'prospecting on.

This is pretty amazing stuff, really. I'm not sure exactly how feasible it all is, really - but hey if it does work, then we really are looking at a massive game changer.

Someone turning up with several hundred years-worth of raw materials, such as is present in (6178) 1986 DA, which is 2.3kms across and contains 10,000 tons of gold, the same amount of platinum and a shit load of iron - 10 billion tonnes of it.

So what do you reckon - pipe dream? Or Way of the Future?

I think it's just viral marketing for his upcoming 'DigDug' movie adaptation.

pipe dream and publicity stunt IMO.

The cost of recovery and CO2 footprint in actualising the resources will far outweigh the return unless gold and other resources hit something like 200 or 2,000 times what they are now and assume we aren't using the required resources blowing the shit out of eachother.

gold is a perfect example. the effort to recycle gold has been quite low until very recently, surely in the [near] future recycling and sustainability will mature to a point where most of household and commercial rubbish will be reused.

That's all we need, some miners pulling 1986 DA into earth orbit for easy raping, and then making Melancholia come true.

I mean I want the naked Kirsten Dunst bit to come true, but not the 10kt of gold crashing onto my head bit.

I could see a point of building a depot in space for further exploration - I have seen some preliminary ideas about how they plan on getting the resources back down to earth, too.

But it's going to cost a hell of a lot, true

^ isn't that the point of the international space station?

I though the point of the ISS was a celebration of glasnost?

I love the idea of this! There's gold in them thar meteors.

Images of people towing in a huge asteroid chock fulla gold, gold I tells ya! "Left a bit, right a bit, straighten her up......gah you idiot you just flattened half of Cape Town! Duh! I said left!"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bracko

pipe dream and publicity stunt IMO.

The cost of recovery and CO2 footprint in actualising the resources will far outweigh the return unless gold and other resources hit something like 200 or 2,000 times what they are now and assume we aren't using the required resources blowing the shit out of eachother.

gold is a perfect example. the effort to recycle gold has been quite low until very recently, surely in the [near] future recycling and sustainability will mature to a point where most of household and commercial rubbish will be reused.

I thought this project was aimed at finding rare earths. When you consider that 95% of the worlds production of rare earths is in China (with 37% of reserves there) and the nature of rare earth deposits on the planet this might actually be viable.

I think substances like Gold would come much later once the costs of this method of extraction had dropped considerably.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

I thought this project was aimed at finding rare earths. When you consider that 95% of the worlds production of rare earths is in China (with 37% of reserves there) and the nature of rare earth deposits on the planet this might actually be viable.

I think substances like Gold would come much later once the costs of this method of extraction had dropped considerably.

I dunno, rare earth prices and supply have only just reached the point where everyone else is starting to look at digging up their own. I imagine it's going to be a while before it hits asteroid levels, especially once other sources come on line.

the interesting bit for me is that they're going to have rethink mining procedures, going to be a bit difficult to blast bits off then conveyor them around in 0g

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

I thought this project was aimed at finding rare earths. When you consider that 95% of the worlds production of rare earths is in China (with 37% of reserves there) and the nature of rare earth deposits on the planet this might actually be viable.

I think substances like Gold would come much later once the costs of this method of extraction had dropped considerably.

the example they have (as far as i recall) mainly pointed to gold, with rare earth metals being a footnote. Logically the smaller the quantity the more reasonable it becomes. The whole thing is just so ridiculous though. how are they going to persuade a fucking metor to go into geo-orbit...

everything about this smacks of scam salesmen who thought up the idea while off their collective heads on booze and coke.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bracko

pipe dream and publicity stunt IMO.

The cost of recovery and CO2 footprint in actualising the resources will far outweigh the return unless gold and other resources hit something like 200 or 2,000 times what they are now and assume we aren't using the required resources blowing the shit out of eachother.

Yes but if they manipulate local space-time geometry that won't be an issue.

Dyson Sphere or GTFO

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/...e-in-five.html

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bracko

the example they have (as far as i recall) mainly pointed to gold, with rare earth metals being a footnote. Logically the smaller the quantity the more reasonable it becomes. The whole thing is just so ridiculous though. how are they going to persuade a fucking metor to go into geo-orbit...

everything about this smacks of scam salesmen who thought up the idea while off their collective heads on booze and coke.

According to their site they will initially look for an asteroid with water on it to convert to liquid hydrogen and oxygen, giving themselves a cheap fuel supply making travel outside the atmosphere cheap.

Then they are planning on mining platinum.

Quote:

Rare Metals from Asteroids Once we are able to access, process, and utilize asteroid water resources, mining metals becomes more feasible. Some near-Earth asteroids contain platinum group metals in much higher concentrations than the richest Earth mines. In space, a single platinum-rich 500 meter wide asteroid contains about 174 times the yearly world output of platinum, and 1.5 times the known world-reserves of platinum group metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum). This amount is enough to fill a basketball court to four times the height of the rim. By contrast, all of the platinum group metals mined to date in history would not reach waist-high on that same basketball court.

So initially they are going to need some sort of station to convert the water into hydrogen and oxygen and store them both and they will probably want to store metals there too until craft capable of landing on the planet comes to pick it up.

So initial cost would be getting the station and mining craft into space and assembled. The ISS cost $12.2B in 1987 and had a total cost of operation of $72.4B in 2010 (in 2010 dollars) so considering they would need a larger station to store all the stuff they are going to dump in it a $50b to $100b outlay on station and mining craft are fairly feasible (I am assuming here they would also assemble the mining craft in space).

So not an unreachable figure for a conglomerate of businessmen and women. How long they'd wait for a return is a different story.

I thought you were on the Na'vi's side, Cameron.

Think of the children.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

According to their site they will initially look for an asteroid with water on it to convert to liquid hydrogen and oxygen, giving themselves a cheap fuel supply making travel outside the atmosphere cheap.

Then they are planning on mining platinum.


So initially they are going to need some sort of station to convert the water into hydrogen and oxygen and store them both and they will probably want to store metals there too until craft capable of landing on the planet comes to pick it up.

So initial cost would be getting the station and mining craft into space and assembled. The ISS cost $12.2B in 1987 and had a total cost of operation of $72.4B in 2010 (in 2010 dollars) so considering they would need a larger station to store all the stuff they are going to dump in it a $50b to $100b outlay on station and mining craft are fairly feasible (I am assuming here they would also assemble the mining craft in space).

So not an unreachable figure for a conglomerate of businessmen and women. How long they'd wait for a return is a different story.

I wonder if anyone is looking at the risk from destabilised asteroid orbits. There's a market here for Solarian Impact Assessments.

Good point. There would also need to be some sort of plan re. the debris left over once they had extracted all the material worth transporting to the surface. If they are simply dragging asteroids to the station then they would have a problem with debris in Earths upper atmosphere. If they process all ore at the asteroid then the operations would stand a good chance of changing orbits or creating large debris fields.

Of course I am assuming they are going to set up a station and use it as a base.

They could just have the fuel conversion equipment on board the space craft and fly around till the craft is fully loaded then come back and try landing but I think that would be more expensive in the long term. Much better to have space only mining craft (which could be much larger) and using some sort of shuttle to transport metals to the surface. Plus a station could service more than one craft.

Once the operation really gets underway they could start collecting iron, tungsten etc from asteroids and construct then assemble all large space craft parts directly in space with materials gathered in space and just fly up complex electronics etc which would lower costs again.

If the mining doesn't work out they could always recoup their losses by dragging an asteroid into earth orbit and demanding a ransom to not drop it on the White House. They could even add a giant laser canon to the asteroid.

(Nice Asimov reference btw)

CG

I would also at minimum double your top figure. even exploratory drilling has so many technological issues I can identify as not much more than a layman... the scale of the project dwarfs anything i can think of. If man kind can't plug a leaking tap 1500m under water properly how the hell are they going to mine in orbit?

Yeah agreed, I have no idea what their running costs would be.

They would need to make a space craft many times larger than any we have made before and assemble it in space. Then you'd need a fairly large crew to operate it and also run the mining operations.

Then you have the problem of actually extracting the minerals in a zero g environment which I notice they are very light on the details for on their site (they have lots of ideas for exploration).

Most terrestrial mining uses low yield explosives but explosions are probably the last thing you want near a craft fueled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as high velocity shrapnel could damage the craft or leave deadly debris fields around the asteroid.
It would also be hard to use tools like jackhammers and the like in low-g environments.
It's not feasible to make the craft bigger than the asteroids it mines.
Drilling without explosives is extremely time consuming.

I guess they could use a blast shield on the front of the ship but then we get back to the original problem, every part of the original ship (or ships) will need to be transported from the surface of the planet so getting a very thick (and heavy) blast shield would drastically increase the initial cost of the space craft. And it wouldn't solve the high velocity debris problem.

Maybe someone with a better understanding of mining or engineering can come up with some ideas. I can only see problems with all the methods I can think of.

they put a man on the moon with no understanding of what they were doing*, in a few short years after Kennedy plucked the idea out of his arse.

Humans can do this thing if they want to. We are an inventive bunch.

note : may not have actually happened

which leads me to think the easiest option would be to leave the asteriod as is and give it a little shove towards Earth, then do the processing here.

Feel controlling the descent is the easier than dealing with processing, logistics problems etc

Ok in the videos they have in the wired article linked in the news section (which use the same stills as the images from their site) they have an 8 second clip which shows how they "plan" on extracting minerals from the asteroid using some sort of combine harvester.

Not sure how well that would work in low gravity environments because their "harvester" would just bounce along the surface unless they used some for of propulsion to enough create downward force that the harvester would actually dig into the rock. I think we can write off their current plans for extraction as being "magic possibly to be developed at a later date after people have given us all their money"

Their plan for getting water rich asteroids does in fact involve building a craft large enough to capture an entire asteroid.

Yet for some reason the video showing how satellites could send a radio signal to another satellite which could transmit back to earth is well over a minute. They definitely need more time to come up with some viable method of mining.

It's pretty clear they haven't gotten much further than planning the exploration phase in any detail.

Ok the space shuttle had a landing load capacity of 14 and a bit tons.

Platinum currently costs $55 million a ton meaning a fully laden shuttle would be able to carry $770 Million worth of platinum to the surface.

A shuttle launch and landing costs on average about $1,400 Million so each flight would lose approx $630 Million without taking in the costs of actually mining the metal and refining it into consideration.

Essentially the entire concept is a bust till they work out a cheap method of transporting stuff from space to Earth.

Yeah, they aren't going to be filling up a space shuttle and getting the resources back to earth that way.

That would be prohibitive in cost, let alone using up all of the shuttle's time.

It'll be cut down and then probably parachuted back down to earth. That wouldn't be difficult to over come and is probably the least of their worries.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

Essentially the entire concept is a bust till they work out a cheap method of transporting stuff from space to Earth.

A really, really, really big bucket elevator.




[actually, i recal some fucking numpty proposing this a few years ago...... N.B. not me]

The only really viable method of getting material to earth is by using rockets as brakes to land it on the planet.

So what happens if it goes a little of course and lands in my back yard rather than their designated landing area? Essentially I'd become a millionaire overnight.

But my point really was they haven't bothered to even think about ways to get around the serious engineering problems (transport through a gravity well, mining in zero-g, generating liquid hydrogen and oxygen from ice in zero g at near absolute zero temperatures.) all they have done is come up with a plan for them to be able to use Google maps on asteroids.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

The only really viable method of getting material to earth is by using rockets as brakes to land it on the planet.

So what happens if it goes a little of course and lands in my back yard rather than their designated landing area? Essentially I'd become a millionaire overnight.

But my point really was they haven't bothered to even think about ways to get around the serious engineering problems (transport through a gravity well, mining in zero-g, generating liquid hydrogen and oxygen from ice in zero g at near absolute zero temperatures.) all they have done is come up with a plan for them to be able to use Google maps on asteroids.

no shit.

on the other hand if we become a Kardashev Type II civilisation that could all change - and someone may as well be thinking about - beats trying to solve the many problems facing us right now doesn't it?

they have been throwing around the idea of a space elevator for a while now...
you can look into it here:

http://www.isec.org/index.php/about-...sion-statement

sounds like an amazing idea...

i know is sounds a bit science fiction but i believe any kind of space resources mining methods will be reliant of forward bases being set up in lesser gravities ie. moon or mars and tech such as space elevators, but hey, private enterprise is surely to road to those sorts of things coming to fruition

...and really, if you fast forward a bit, when space exploration and settlement becomes more of the focus there would be more need for the resources out there, not down here...

Quote:

Originally Posted by claude glass

on the other hand if we become a Kardashev Type II civilisation that could all change - and someone may as well be thinking about - beats trying to solve the many problems facing us right now doesn't it?

Well to reach Type II we would need to have space construction up and running if we want to build that Dyson Sphere, which would mean we'd need space mining already.

Space mining with our current technology is really only economically viable for space construction. For instance any trip we plan on making to Mars would probably be easier if we can build a very large space craft to hold lots of scientists and research equipment (not to mention food and other supplies to last several years). The costs of airlifting all the components via shuttle and the engineering problems that would cause could quite possibly be dramatically lowered if we had some form of asteroid mining set up.

It's just a little disappointing to me that people (including every science or technology reporter I've seen who has written a story about this) are treating this like it's a serious attempt at space mining when they haven't looked at any of the engineering problems that are pretty much the reason it is cheaper to extract the minerals terrestrially.

Their business plan can be summed up as:

1: Put telescope satellite into space. Use this to find asteroids and map their orbits.
2: Send satellite probes out to asteroids to laser map the surface of the asteroids. Yay Google maps are up and running and Planetary Resources executives can use Asteroid Street View in Powerpoint presentations..
3: ????
4: Use mineral surveys to find water rich asteroids.
5: ?????
6: Create rocket fuel.
7: ?????
8: Yay endless supplies of space platinum
9: ??????
10: Profit.

3,5,7 and 9 being the bits where they do mineral surveys, mine stuff and then transport the stuff back to earth. Essentially we have a mining company with no actual plans on how they go about exploration, extraction and transporting their product back to Earth.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

I thought this project was aimed at finding rare earths. When you consider that 95% of the worlds production of rare earths is in China (with 37% of reserves there) and the nature of rare earth deposits on the planet this might actually be viable.

I think substances like Gold would come much later once the costs of this method of extraction had dropped considerably.

Really? Rare earths aint that "rare", they are just dirty and expensive to dig up and process. That's why China was able to put a stranglehold on the market. The world has been looking for other suppliers than China (esp. the US and Japan) for a few years now. Mt Weld in WA (owned by Lynas) has some of the best deposits in the world and as soon as their Malaysian processing plant starts Australia will become a major player. Unfortunately, local Malaysian politicians that are linked to the Chinese (surprise surprise) are running a scare campaign to stop it.

whatever happened with that space elevator project.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

It's just a little disappointing to me that people (including every science or technology reporter I've seen who has written a story about this) are treating this like it's a serious attempt at space mining when they haven't looked at any of the engineering problems that are pretty much the reason it is cheaper to extract the minerals terrestrially.

Many journalists just reproduce the media release, they're not paid to research these days.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Abziie

whatever happened with that space elevator project.

It's still going ahead. The main setback is the mass production of Carbon Nano-Tubes, but aside from that, we have the rest of the technology to make it possible.

Japan is investing a fucktonne into it, I'm pretty sure they were hoping construction would start around 2010-2011 with a estimated cost of around 10 billion and a build time of 10 years, but alas the Carbon Nano-Tube mass production problem still hinders us.

just found something almost relevant while searching for something else:

Off-world Robotic Excavation for Large-scale Habitat Construction and Resource Extraction

So that CSIRO paper acknowledges that a primary concern of mining in space is

Quote:

Selecting suitable machines to undertake the excavation task in a low gravity, low atmosphere environment.

but then fails to actually look into what this entails and just sticks to talking about how to remote control mining equipment.

They even reference (Satish, Radziszewski, & Ouellet 2005) which discusses and evaluates the design issues and challenges
of various current and novel mining techniques for the Moon and Mars.

Then they point out that

Quote:

These design criteria do not however, consider issues of large excavation properties such as slope stability and machine control, nor operation in low-gravity and vacuums.

Fuck I should have been a rocket scientist. Seems like the easiest job in the world.

Every paper I've seen points out the biggest problem with space mining is gravity and/or vacuums and then forgets to come up with any solutions for these problems. Even The Conversations articles on asteroid funding ignored both the difficulties of mining in low-g environments and vacuums and also ignored the high costs of moving material into and out of our gravity well. They did stop to demand the Australian Government put more funding into their field though, so mission accomplished.

there' no real point in discussing how to get it back to earth if you can't work out how to stop it floating away.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kiron

It's still going ahead. The main setback is the mass production of Carbon Nano-Tubes, but aside from that, we have the rest of the technology to make it possible.

Japan is investing a fucktonne into it, I'm pretty sure they were hoping construction would start around 2010-2011 with a estimated cost of around 10 billion and a build time of 10 years, but alas the Carbon Nano-Tube mass production problem still hinders us.

Yeah great space elevators, so you're 0.01% of the way to the moon, 0.0001% of the way to the nearest planet or asteroid, and 0.000000001% of the way to the nearest star
wooppeedoo
what now Kimosabe?

So apart from missing the technology to make space elevators they are also yet to find a reason.

not having to blast a shitload of rocket fuel to get materials and persons into orbit is a great reason...

"in orbit" isn't anywhere, and you still need a huge amount of energy to raise anything off the ground that far

If you have a space elevator (a big if, but let's say we have one) - then the purpose of that would be to negate the need to spend heaps of fuel to rise up out of a gravity well, making it shitloads cheaper.

You'd have a much cheaper way of getting things into orbit - meaning you don't have to rely on shitty expensive rockets to get people and stuff there.

But the real kicker is, if you have a space elevator then all you have to do to is cut things into a size big enough for the elevator to handle it, then bring it back to earth to refine it further.

That's still a pretty big 'if', but it makes it much more feasible.

Quote:

Originally Posted by horst

"in orbit" isn't anywhere, and you still need a huge amount of energy to raise anything off the ground that far

The ISS is 'in orbit'… you mean to say that, whatever they are doing there they must not be doing much because wherever they are, they are not anywhere in particular or at least nowhere that could possibly be of any real use to those of us down here so they should just cut this silly nonsense out??

Plus, shitloads of rocket fuel >huge amount of energy…

The ISS will have cost over US$150B by 2015 and is in no way sustainable without more funding and resources being spent into orbit. Electricity is their only sustainable resource.

To put that in perspective US$72.4B is what NASA has spent on parts and consumables.
Russia has spent US$12B on parts and consumables.
Europe US$5B parts and consumables.
Japan US$5B parts and consumables.
Canada US$2B parts and consumables.
Total: US$96.4B

To get that all into space cost US$50.4B

Basically 1/3 of their costs are simply transport costs. Which is essentially the biggest current financial risk of any attempt to industrialise or exploit resources of space.

If they did get a space elevator up and running and it was significantly cheaper to run than shuttles (shuttles cost US$1.4B per run and carry a little over 14 metric tons of cargo) it would mean carrying parts for other stations in space would be cheaper so actually make exploitation of space resources economically viable once fuel production in space had started.

But that's the kicker - it has to be cheaper in terms of cost per ton of cargo to operate to make it worthwhile. And we have to work out how to make one. Minor details, but without a plan to address the cost of travel out of our gravity well there is no way we will ever make it into space as anything but tourists.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fangoriously

If you have a space elevator (a big if, but let's say we have one) - then the purpose of that would be to negate the need to spend heaps of fuel to rise up out of a gravity well, making it shitloads cheaper.

You'd have a much cheaper way of getting things into orbit - meaning you don't have to rely on shitty expensive rockets to get people and stuff there.

But the real kicker is, if you have a space elevator then all you have to do to is cut things into a size big enough for the elevator to handle it, then bring it back to earth to refine it further.

That's still a pretty big 'if', but it makes it much more feasible.

And how do you propose the 'small bits' get to the space elevator?
do you even know what a space elevator is? how it stays up there?
what about conservation of energy? Gravitation?
Because what you are saying is we have magic, so all we have to do is use magic.
Maybe work on space elevators will lead to other useful technology, but as outlined, to haul things a little way into the air or brings things down is just silly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The3rdPlumpDj

The ISS is 'in orbit'… you mean to say that, whatever they are doing there they must not be doing much because wherever they are, they are not anywhere in particular or at least nowhere that could possibly be of any real use to those of us down here so they should just cut this silly nonsense out??

oh jesus, the ISS is the poster boy for science money wasted, they spent 14 years building it, and are throwing it in the ocean in 4 years, pretty much no scientific output of any significance has been produced. And btw 400km off the ground isn't space (actually the thermosphere).

"No one has any idea what to do with the space station. We know what to do with a telescope," Park told Discovery News. "The ISS is just a way of keeping human beings in space. It's flag-pole sitting."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30970659.../#.T86NbFI4rt8

Quote:

Originally Posted by horst

And btw 400km off the ground isn't space (actually the thermosphere).

It is the thermosphere, but everything above the Karman line at 100km is defined as outer space.

Quote:

Originally Posted by horst

And how do you propose the 'small bits' get to the space elevator?
do you even know what a space elevator is? how it stays up there?
what about conservation of energy? Gravitation?
Because what you are saying is we have magic, so all we have to do is use magic.
Maybe work on space elevators will lead to other useful technology, but as outlined, to haul things a little way into the air or brings things down is just silly.

Thanks for the condescending tone, but yes, I'm well aware of what a space elevator entails and how it works.

I'm not say 'all we have to do is use magic' at all - and it's not 'hauling things a little way into the air' in the slightest - over 100km up is the line that determines whether you're in space; it's also out of the gravity well so getting things up there is a lot cheaper, though admittedly it will cost a lot to build such an elevator.

If you tether one end to the earth, another to a large object in space, then you can run things up and down the elevator cheaply.

Yes, getting an asteroid to earth and carving it up is a difficult and expensive thing to do. However saying 'oh it's all too hard, let's not do it' is a mistake, IMO.

Well I can't speak for horst but myself I do see the need to move our mining and industry into space if only to reduce pollution here.

I'm just objecting to the way every scientist on the planet who talks about it ignore vacuum and gravity which are the two main reasons why space mining isn't viable.

Any talk about space mining that doesn't first involve discussing how we would actually get the mined materials to the market is just blowing smoke up peoples arses. When scientific bodies go around blowing smoke up our arses it costs money.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griggle

Well I can't speak for horst but myself I do see the need to move our mining and industry into space if only to reduce pollution here.

I'm just objecting to the way every scientist on the planet who talks about it ignore vacuum and gravity which are the two main reasons why space mining isn't viable.

Any talk about space mining that doesn't first involve discussing how we would actually get the mined materials to the market is just blowing smoke up peoples arses. When scientific bodies go around blowing smoke up our arses it costs money.

Read this http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/...rces/#more-470