[HN Gopher] Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears...
___________________________________________________________________
Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making
headway
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 102 points
Date : 2024-08-24 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Platinum-group metals on earth: $965/oz
|
| Water, volatiles and carbonaceous materials anywhere else in the
| solar system: priceless
| credit_guy wrote:
| Not really. You can't set up a "gas station" somewhere in the
| Solar system. It has to orbit. Anything in orbit goes many,
| many times faster than a bullet. Aligning yourself with such a
| fast moving object is doable, but costs a lot of fuel. Then
| detaching yourself from that orbit in order to go to your
| original destination burns a lot of fuel too. But let's say you
| get more fuel from that station than you burn. Who is going to
| replenish the station, and how? They need to burn a lot of fuel
| too, to go to an asteroid and back. It's not completely
| impossible, but it's quite unlikely.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Where did I say I'd waste volatiles moving things around?
|
| (1) Build a solar sail factory on a CC asteroid and you can
| deliver sunshades to Earth-Sun L1 without wasting volatiles
| as reaction mass
|
| (2) If you read this paper and really thought about it
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487
|
| You'd realize that it strictly dominates all other space
| colonization schemes that have been proposed because it
| doesn't waste volatiles for transportation. Certainly
| O'Neill's ideas look infeasible in comparison (where do you
| get the nitrogen to fill those big airspaces? My plan for a
| baby Bernal sphere intended to be a luxury hotel in LEO still
| takes 15 starship loads of LN2 for the atmosphere)
|
| Even Musk's plan to colonize Mars is something that only
| makes sense to people who were born on a planet. If "grabby"
| aliens capable of interstellar travel and building such
| things here they might find the Earth a curiosity at best.
| mapt wrote:
| Solar sails are at this time quite useless for most
| purposes, and always will be if we can't build, fold, and
| deploy working sails of micrometer thickness, and/or build
| gigawatt-scale laser launch projectors.
|
| Using ion thrusters it is already the case that we have
| access to power-generation-limited domain of specific
| impulse; Nobody thinks a mission at 30,000isp instead of
| 3,000isp is superior for interplanetary because of the
| sheer amount of waiting time and the extreme mass fraction
| of the solar panels. Solar sails, even moreso.
|
| And one more dream to kill - large open volumes are
| probably never going to happen. This is implied by the
| mathematical engineering reality of the thin-walled
| pressure vessel, whose minimum mass scales directly with
| (volume * pressure) / tensile strength. Contrary to my
| naive expectations, there is no square cube ratio to the
| structure of a pressure vessel, so every cubic meter costs
| mass.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Solar sails and large open spaces face big challenges,
| but experiments like JAXA's IKAROS, the LightSail
| missions, and NASA's NanoSail-D2 have shown that solar
| sails can work in space.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Isn't that a bit like saying the solar car cross-country
| races show that solar-powered cars can work? In both
| cases the 'payload' and vehicles are stripped to the
| barest essentials.
|
| Solar sails with any significant mass attached to them
| would either need to be impossibly large, and/or operate
| on timescales that make ion propulsion seem like a warp
| drive. And that's not counting the issue of _stopping_
| when you get to your destination, which will either
| require some insane laser /power source already at your
| destination, or propellant- in which case you're back to
| just using that in the first place.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| You're right. Solar sails need to be massive to move
| anything heavy, and they take a long time to build up
| speed. Stopping is another big hurdle. But they're not
| supposed to replace everything. They're useful when you
| can't carry fuel, like on really long missions. They're
| slow, but they work for what they're designed to do: keep
| going without needing fuel.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Funny, a low performance solar sail is actually a high
| performance sunshade, you'd actually do better with a
| black sunshade than a highly reflective one.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Somebody pointed out to me that IKAROS didn't last that
| long (neither did its namesake), so far that's the best
| rebuttal to my L1 sunshade plan but I'd imagine a second
| generation product could do better. People so forget that
| space is a corrosive environment that will wreck many
| materials.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Faci
| lit...
| dylan604 wrote:
| "The docking mechanism is simple--since the asteroid is likely to
| be iron-rich, Vestri will use magnets to attach itself."
|
| While that sounds simple, it does make it sound like the mining
| part just became much more difficult.
|
| Thinking about some of the sci-fi regarding asteroid mining, I've
| always liked the idea of bringing the asteroid to park into an
| orbit around earth to make it easier/cheaper for multiple
| deliveries, but I've always wonder what kind of ownership claims
| that would imply. If I took the time and effort to park an
| asteroid in orbit, would I have sole ownership of it or would you
| be able to mine from it as well?
| choeger wrote:
| I don't think that moving the whole thing into our orbit would
| make much sense.
|
| The biggest amount of delta-v is necessary to leave Earth's
| gravity well. Once you're there, going from and to asteroid is
| time-consuming but doesn't need that much delta-v, moving ore
| from the asteroid to Earth would cost some fuel, proportional
| to the mass.
|
| So moving it into orbit would save time but require us to pay
| for the fuel all at once.
|
| So why should someone do this, unless you need a permanent
| human presence on the asteroid?
| nordsieck wrote:
| > So why should someone do this, unless you need a permanent
| human presence on the asteroid?
|
| Activity is only economically valuable if it is valued - i.e.
| by people.
|
| Unless there's a population of people living in space, the
| ore or products derived from ore need to eventually make
| their way to Earth in order to be worth while.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I think we're all scared of the actual question posed or
| something as we've totally ignored it in everyone of these
| responses.
|
| Nobody cares in sci-fi about whether something should/could
| be done. That's not the purview of the plot. It's also not
| the purview of the original comment.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > I've always liked the idea of bringing the asteroid to park
| into an orbit around earth to make it easier/cheaper for
| multiple deliveries
|
| I think you're dramatically underestimating the difficulty of
| doing this.
|
| If you look at rockets, they're 90-95% propellant. Even
| relatively svelt upper stages like Centaur III (the upper stage
| from Atlas v) are more than 50% propellant. And that's for just
| taking payloads to LEO - for higher energy missions, the usable
| payload gets smaller, which means the percent of the upper
| stage that's propellant increases.
|
| How difficult would it be to get an amount of propellant, say,
| 5 times the mass of the asteroid to the asteroid? You'd also
| have to get the engines and other structures to let you use the
| propellant in a productive way.
|
| It's way easier to extract valuable parts from an astroid and
| move a lot less mass there and back.
| api wrote:
| Moving mass back with a free return trajectory is much easier
| than getting stuff out of Earths gravity well and up there.
| Escape velocity from an asteroid is low and if you yeet it
| with enough precision you can send it on a trajectory that
| will land it on Earth.
|
| As for moving the asteroid you could use extremely high
| specific impulse ion thrusters, in situ propellant from the
| asteroid itself, or a solar sail. But you are right that
| simply firing the valuable stuff back to Earth is probably
| easier.
| lolinder wrote:
| Not to mention the governance and liability implications of
| the plan. If a company mining something on Earth screws up
| _really_ badly, they can ruin the environment for a hundred
| miles around. If a company mining an asteroid in LEO screws
| up _really_ badly, the literal blast radius would wipe out a
| significant percentage of life on earth.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why does it need to be parked in LEO? It could be kept in
| an orbit at the same distance as the Moon and it would
| still be relatively close compared to where it is now
| lolinder wrote:
| Fair. I don't think we'd want that either, though, for
| the same reason. The moon is too close for comfort for
| smaller objects that we've proven we can move.
| Teever wrote:
| What about using the asteroid itself as fuel? Even if the
| asteroid is devoid of hydrocarbons that could be turned into
| fuel for conventional engines iron make a suitable (albeit
| inefficient) fuel for ion thrusters powered by solar panels.
|
| Mass drivers and linear rails are also viable ways of
| bringing raw material into Earth's orbit from asteroids of a
| certain size.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| This was my thought as well. Also for what it's worth iron
| oxidation is slow but very exothermic.
|
| So what you'd want is a LEO starting point/station. You
| launch a barge from there to snag an asteroid. You could
| use a mass driver using solar or nuclear and mass from a
| previously spent asteroid to get to the asteroid belt, then
| snag an asteroid and use its mass to get back. You strip
| the important parts of it, construct a capsule for what you
| mined, and nudge it so it falls someplace in say a shallow
| part of the ocean. Then recover from there.
|
| Or hell why mine it up there? Simply nudge an asteroid on a
| collision course towards Earth to make sure it falls
| someplace "safe". Sure most of it will burn up but not all.
| It's free material after all.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Didn't the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs hit the
| ocean?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Sure. So size matters. If you drop a rock in the ocean it
| doesn't darken the skies, does it?
|
| Meteors fall onto Earth all the time. It is a matter of
| composition, trajectory, and mass, no?
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Ok, just park an ion drive on the asteroid and your
| descendant's descendants' descendants' get to mine it from
| LEO?
| cletus wrote:
| I'm not sure what substance you could mine on an asteroid that
| could possibly be economical.
|
| The first obvious assumption is would have to be launched from
| space and return to space because the cost of getting a payload
| from Earth to LEO is a huge extra expense.
|
| Then you have to consider the delta-V of getting to the asteroid,
| doing a rendezvous and getting back. If that's so significant
| that the Earth launch cost is trivial then the delta-V budget is
| so huge, it must make the endeavour even more uneconomical.
|
| I believe humanity's future is in a Dyson Swarm. There are simply
| too many advantages. This is a deep topic. The question is how do
| you bootstrap that? Where do you get raw materials?
|
| I don't think it's from asteroids. I very much suspect it's from
| a larger body and my money is on Mercury. Why? On pretty much any
| body in the Solar System you're living underground so Mercury is
| at no disadvantage here. It has no atmosphere. That's an
| advantage. Mars's super thin atmosphere is the worst of both
| worlds. Additionally, Mercury is metal rich and due to its
| proximity to the Sun, energy is abundant (ie solar power).
| Interestingly, it has a higher orbital speed than Earth (47km/s
| vs 30km/s). That's really interesting because it's free velocity
| to leave the Solar System.
|
| Resources on EArth are so ridiculously cheap. You can mine iron
| ore for a few dollars a ton at scale. You can convert it into
| steel really cheaply too (again, at scale). Doing anything in
| space requires having truly stupendous amounts of cheap energy
| available.
| ck2 wrote:
| There are neutron stars that create chunks of gold and platinum
| larger than the size of earth itself.
|
| Highly doubt such chunks are floating around our solar system
| but it's an amusing thought that one day hundreds of years from
| now we could nudge a (much) smaller chunk into orbit or park it
| in a Lagrange point and shave off pieces to return to earth.
| julius wrote:
| Mercury sounds interesting. Requires a certain scale though
| (gravity is a bitch).
|
| Considering just the initial mining and construction, bodies
| with low gravity and proximity to the earth feel like an
| efficient starting point, right? I always thought the moon
| would be a good place to bootstrap the first few thousand space
| habitats.
|
| Your point about energy will probably be the biggest deal.
| Wondering how complicated it would be to ship a bunch of
| nuclear reactors to the moon. There seems to be quite a few
| companies working on small, "mass produced" reactors currently.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Send a piece of lead in orbit around the sun so it heats up but
| not melts, when it comes around heat some water to steam. Free
| power!
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Once all of your water is steam, how do you get it back into
| a liquid phase so that you can do it over again?
|
| Or so that you can do other things, like drink it...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The internet is a messed-up place, because as much as I'm
| convinced this is a joke, I'm also certain somebody could
| write the same comment in all seriousness and think they are
| making a great discovery.
|
| We can't even just laugh.
| patall wrote:
| In terms of delta-v, the asteroids are much closer to us than
| mercury. A small one in the belt is like delta 1.5km/s from
| earth escape, versus 11km/s to mercury. Heck, the Mars moons
| are technically closer to us than 'our' moon. (Overview i.e
| deltavmap.github.io/)
|
| And the sun is a gravity well. Mercuries higher orbital speed
| will not help you leave the solar system. In fact, it is the
| other way around.
|
| Oh, and solar cells are already crazy good. With all the space
| you have out there, higher energy density on mercury will be
| very marginally important.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| re: delta V, the chaotic nature of orbits involving many bodies
| means that a very well-timed nudge ought to be sufficient to
| move certain asteroids quite a long distance for "free". So the
| problem becomes finding the right asteroid, and the right time,
| and the right nudge vector. More about computation than rocket
| fuel: the deeper into that chaotic system we can penetrate, the
| less we have to spend on influencing it.
|
| You've also got to slow it down when it gets to where your
| smelters are. For that I'd propose we just let it smash into
| the moon and then mine it on the surface. We can alternate
| which sides we smash into in order to prevent the moon's orbit
| from changing significantly.
|
| Of course you still need to provide the initial nudge, which
| ain't nothing, but it's a far cry from towing an asteroid or
| towing a smelter.
| theptip wrote:
| A medium-sized asteroid identified had something like $3T of
| titanium on it. Of course, that's gross value and you can't
| clear your supply at that price. But even if it costs hundreds
| of billions to extract you should be able to net a profit.
| luqtas wrote:
| breaking news: asteroid mining company mismatch calculus and the
| rock hits a rural city in Texas
| kibwen wrote:
| Asteroid mining only makes sense for constructing things in
| space. For applications here on Earth, the logistics of both
| leaving and re-entering the gravity well mean that it will never,
| ever be economical for anything other than materials that
| literally don't exist on Earth. Bringing platinum and gold from
| asteroids to Earth doesn't make economic sense, let alone iron.
| Teever wrote:
| But once you have that infrastructure in space that can mine
| and construct in space won't that greatly shorten the supply
| chain for asteroid mining and bring the cost down?
|
| It seems to me that when people make the kind of argument that
| you're making they're forgetting to price the negative
| externalities that Earth based mining cost our society via
| environmental damage.
|
| If the environmental damage and species decline that we're
| experiencing from our planet-side economic endeavours were
| properly priced in space based manufacturing and asteroid
| mining would look a lot more attractive.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| The key to manufacturing is humans. Robots help yet need a
| lot of human maintenance. Human-free spacecraft require a lot
| of lead time and still begin from a human touch on earth.
|
| NEO is too resource starved for it to ever be independent
| enough to be cheaper than just managing resources better on
| the surface of Earth.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Maintanance is hard, but there is a solution.
|
| Design the robots out of materials that can be found in
| space. Then make them capable of reproduction. Then you can
| just scrap damaged robots as long as you can replace them
| fast enough. This also has the benefit that you just need
| to send up a tiny bootstrap population, but with time you
| will have quite the formidable workforce.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Doubtful there are enough resources to sustainably
| maintain much of anything in NEO. Asteroids with
| significant reservoirs are far apart and navigating
| between them is fraught.
|
| Also how are the robots going to know what and how to
| maintain things? Otherwise they must be remote
| controlled. Yet their sensors break down over time.
|
| Do reproducing robots even exist on Earth? How robust,
| nimble, and capable are they? Are their inputs found in
| space?
|
| All that said, I do love the idea of a robot space colony
| producing useful things, even if all we gain are space
| probes and knowledge.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Robot production on earth is entangled with the whole
| global supply chain. I do believe many of the steps are
| automatic or semi-automatic.
|
| It's """simply""" a matter of separating taking all those
| steps and separating them from the whole, packaging them
| into a bunch of boxes and sending them to space.
|
| So in other words it's incredibly complicated... but
| possible.
| Teever wrote:
| You may find this link interesting:
|
| https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories
| collingreen wrote:
| Kind of a hand-wavy solution here - don't worry about
| maintenance just invent a self replicating universal tool
| that is either perfectly recyclable or cheap enough that
| we don't need to worry about their resource costs or
| cleanup. With that kind of tech nailed down pretty much
| ANY endeavor sounds very achievable (until the cheap
| startup version cuts one too many corners and the gray
| goo scenario begins I guess).
| Teever wrote:
| But isn't it just the natural progression of innovations
| like interchangeable parts and assembly line
| manufacturing?
|
| And isn't it already a thing that we're progressing to
| with increased industrial output and reduced labour
| requirements?
|
| This is where we're going, we just need an driver to push
| us to do it. Space exploration and resource extraction
| from the asteroid belt/moon to prevent the complete
| destruction of our environment seems to be as good a
| driver as any.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| The space elevator will make bringing cargo to/from earth
| trivial and it will happen way before asteroid mining (current
| estimates for it being built is 15-20 years)
| rapsey wrote:
| Wildly optimistic when there is no known material that can be
| used to build it.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Carbon nanotube is an existing material, manufacturing it
| at scale is one of the challenges.
| troupo wrote:
| manufacturing _and_ building anything out of them in the
| required scale
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Carbon nanotubes are not even close to strong enough to
| build a space elevator, that's the whole problem. We have
| no idea if anything that strong even exists, at this
| point.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > Carbon nanotubes are not even close to strong enough to
| build a space elevator, that's the whole problem.
|
| Do you have any sources for that? Because from a quick
| search online I'm seeing that SE requires a tensile
| strength of 60-80 GPa and the theoretical max strength of
| carbon nanotubes can reach 150-200 GPa (with a 63 GPa
| being demonstrated back in 2000)
| adrian_b wrote:
| Nobody can make a nanotube with a length of one meter,
| much less with a length of 1 km or of 100 km.
|
| We can imagine a molecular machine that would grow carbon
| nanotubes like a silkworm grows silk filaments, but we
| are many decades away from this kind of things.
|
| Moreover, the tensile strength is not all. It must resist
| to some intentional or accidental collisions, to
| earthquake waves and so on.
| DennisP wrote:
| We don't need kilometers. We need lots of 7cm nanotubes,
| bonded together with epoxy.
|
| http://images.spaceref.com/docs/spaceelevator/521Edwards.
| pdf
| adrian_b wrote:
| That paper only presents hope that perhaps adhesive
| bonding of carbon nanotubes could produce a cable with
| high tensile strength.
|
| It does not contain any experimental results supporting
| this hope, because only a strength similar to steel has
| been obtained.
|
| Perhaps it will become possible to obtain a higher
| tensile strength than with other materials by this
| method, but it is likely that this will require longer
| nanotubes and perhaps some other kind of polymeric resin
| instead of epoxy. It is very difficult to find anything
| that has high enough adhesion to carbon.
| DennisP wrote:
| Sure, the material had not been produced yet, and still
| hasn't. Getting all those long nanotubes to line up
| parallel is another of the hard parts. It's just a
| theoretical result.
|
| A key part of the design is for the glue to have a low
| enough melting point, so if the cable breaks, it melts on
| reentry and you don't get lots of little fluttery bits
| instead of a big super-strong cable wrapping around the
| planet.
| DennisP wrote:
| Here's a NASA-funded study from the early 2000s, arguing
| that a space elevator could be built as a paper-thin
| ribbon at least a meter wide, composed of carbon
| nanotubes 7cm long, bonded together with epoxy.
|
| http://images.spaceref.com/docs/spaceelevator/521Edwards.
| pdf
|
| The study also addresses lots of other engineering
| issues. This work sparked a lot of subsequent R&D that is
| still ongoing. We're not yet able to actually make the
| ribbon described in the study, but we're getting there.
|
| Then again, if you're willing to rely on dynamic support,
| a minimal orbital ring could be built with materials we
| have today:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
| theptip wrote:
| Tether / skyhook seems a more plausible option.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 15-20 years? I would doubt that range if the process was
| started yesterday. Any reasonable complex project of closing
| that scale takes longer time than that. And those have no
| real unknowns.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I dunno, Dragon's return capacity is 3000kg which is about
| $240m... I think if there _was_ a giant sack of pure gold bars
| up there it would be economically viable. The problem is there
| isn 't. No way are you going to be able to refine it in space
| either.
| kibwen wrote:
| Indeed, I'm referring to the cost of the whole operation,
| including all the bits where you need to develop and deploy a
| fully-autonomous robotic mining operation a zillion miles
| from anywhere.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It might not be so hard to do because space is such a good
| insulator. You could get two chunks spinning on a tether and
| use a solar pumped laser to heat them. It would be a sort of
| melting-point chromoatograph where you'd get different
| materials melting out at different times. Cooling the
| collected material would be expensive, but you'd end up with
| most of the gold all together in one stratum of the result.
| theptip wrote:
| Why would you return the materials in Dragon? You can build a
| simple glider from space-side materials. The return trip is
| way easier than getting out of the gravity well. You don't
| even need crew.
| Teever wrote:
| Bonus points if you design the glider in such a way that it
| is covered in some sort of ablative material that helps
| mitigate climate change after it burns off keeping the
| mined material from doing so to maximize material return.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Return trip is double the complexity as first you need to
| get there. And then you need to slowdown to get back here
| as into orbit. Getting off the Earth is somewhat solved.
| But getting there and back at scale is not really done.
| IshKebab wrote:
| You can't glide back to the surface. Kind of feels like you
| should be able to but it doesn't work out like that. If it
| did then that's how all spacecraft would descend.
|
| Scott Manley did a good video about it.
|
| https://youtu.be/5kl2mm96Jkk?si=Uf9ntP6R39SJrVBm
|
| Skip to 3:45 for your exact "well meaning suggestion from
| people who aren't rocket scientists".
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Smelting using focused solar radiation against a spinning
| carbon crucible would be cheap, mechanically simple, and
| effective. I'm not sure why you think you can't refine in
| space.
| bartonfink wrote:
| Because right now it's not even research, let alone
| economical. This isn't Stellaris, this is real life.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I see, so when pursuing future technologies we should
| stick with what we know? We typically research what's
| achievable in the near future, however the mechanics for
| purifying heavy metals with centrifugal forces isn't new
| fwiw. It's how we made atomic bombs.
| bartonfink wrote:
| So you agree that your earlier suggestion that zero g
| solar centrifuge smelting is "cheap, mechanically simple,
| and effective" was basically a pipe dream straight from
| your ass? You just compared it to the fucking Manhattan
| Project.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Smelting is for extracting metals from oxides or sulfides.
| It can be used on the Moon or on Mars.
|
| It does not work for asteroid mining.
|
| There you have just pieces of iron with a low content of
| alloying elements.
|
| Among the alloying elements, nickel is the most abundant
| (17.3 times less than iron), then cobalt (20.9 times less
| than nickel), then germanium (20.4 times less than cobalt).
|
| The precious metals that would justify the mining operation
| are present as a few grams each for a ton of iron.
|
| Melting the alloy will never separate the metals by itself.
|
| However perhaps some kind of floating zone melting could
| enrich the proportion of precious metals in a part of the
| iron, but it is very unlikely that a high enough enrichment
| could be achieved by a reasonable number of zone melting
| passes.
|
| On earth the cheaper metals could be dissolved by an acid
| solution, but on metallic asteroids you have neither water
| nor acids.
|
| The SciFi solution would be to vaporize and ionize the
| metal alloy and separate the metal ions by their specific
| charge, like in mass spectrometry.
|
| This would need a lot of energy, but at least it does not
| need reactants and it is the only method that achieves
| almost perfect separation.
|
| However for now, the throughput of such a ionic separator
| is extremely small, too small for industrial production.
| Perhaps it will become possible to scale such ionic
| separators to acceptable productivities.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Yes I was actually thinking of a gaseous centrifuge
| process. It would require turning the metals into a gas
| yet not ionizing them and venting the iron gas into space
| leaving an ever enriched gold. Realistically you don't
| need to enrich to total purity.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Unfortunately that does not work, because these metals
| are among those with the highest boiling points, even at
| very low pressures (which is why the oldest solid objects
| that have formed in the Solar System, at its very
| beginning, when it was still very hot, have been
| refractory grains of platinum-group metals with tungsten
| and rhenium; their condensation has been followed by that
| of refractory minerals with high content of oxides of
| aluminum, calcium, titanium and zirconium; and only after
| additional cooling by the mainstream condensation of
| silicates and iron alloy).
|
| There are no materials from which you could make a
| centrifuge for gaseous osmium and iridium.
|
| Vaporizing the input metal with an electron beam and
| ionizing the vapors allows after that contactless
| interaction with the ions, using electric fields and
| magnetic fields, guiding them into separate condensation
| chambers (which need strong cooling).
|
| The ionic current of such separators must be increased
| several orders of magnitude over those currently
| existing, for this to become a viable separation
| technology.
| alemanek wrote:
| If any of these asteroids have water ice buried that might be a
| good start. Easier to refine water and carbon into methane for
| fuel depots in space than other applications. Also drinking
| water, splitting for hydrogen or just use the ice as a
| radiation shield all are near term applications that don't
| require lots of supporting infrastructure.
|
| I suspect that near term they might make some decent money just
| returning small samples for labs to analyze. If they can figure
| out how to do that economically they can likely survive off of
| grant money from various government entities. Contracting their
| asteroid lander for various science missions is also a good
| opportunity.
| antupis wrote:
| Yup that is how I would do it. Water sample returns to labs >
| water mining > platinum/gold/etc.
| prepend wrote:
| I remember reading an article from back when Blue Origin was
| a space mining concern that the first thing to grab is water
| just to supply the space station. Because it's so expensive
| to take water into orbit and retrieving a comet or something
| else was fairly cheap and could yield billions of water for
| use by anyone in orbit.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Suppose one of the things you construct in space is a skyhook.
| The economical way to operate one of those is to bring down as
| much mass as you bring up, that way the net change in angular
| momentum is 0. This would change the economics of bringing
| space-materials down to earth.
|
| That said, we're a long long way from being able to build a
| skyhook. I'm only objecting to the "never, ever" part of your
| post.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> I 'm only objecting to the "never, ever" part of your
| post._
|
| Sure, let me qualify "never, ever" as having a time horizon
| of "so long that anyone claiming that you, the eager
| investor, will see an economic return on this endeavor in
| your lifetime is secretly banking on breakthroughs in life
| extension technologies to make that statement technically
| correct".
| nahkoots wrote:
| "within your natural lifespan" isn't really a qualification
| of "never, ever". The two are very different time frames. I
| think it's good that you're willing to adjust your opinions
| given new information, but it would be nice if you admitted
| that you changed your mind based on what MatrixMan said
| instead of acting like "within your natural lifespan" was
| your original intent.
| kibwen wrote:
| Every prediction about the future--this one, every other
| one ever made, and every other one that will ever be made
| --is implictly made under the assumption that if the
| prediction lies beyond the predictor's lifespan, then the
| predictor will not be in a position to care one whit
| about the veracity of the prediction when that time
| comes. My clarification isn't at all motivated based on
| what the parent commenter said (I find the construction
| of a skyhook approximately as likely as the construction
| of a space elevator, which is to say, it will "never,
| ever" happen), but rather as an explicit clarification of
| the aforementioned implicit assumption.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| My trouble with this definition of never ever is that it
| prevents us from starting on endeavors that may take a
| long time--a self fulfilling prophecy.
|
| We may never ever mitigate our climate concerns, which
| obfuscates that it is a choice we'll have made, not an
| inevitability.
| drdeca wrote:
| Why does it matter whether their caring about whether
| their prediction is correct, is done at the time that
| their prediction is about?
| staunton wrote:
| What would you say to someone who claims that "never"
| obviously means "not before the end of this quarter,
| cause who could possibly care about anything beyond
| that"?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Silver is antimicrobial. Gold is highly conductive.
|
| If we had these materials in absurd excess, we could literally
| build hospitals from silver and the electric grid from gold,
| and it would be great for our civilization.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Gold and silver is less common in space than here on Earth.
| blooalien wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/06/05/g
| o...
|
| You sure about that? Here's just one asteroid made of
| mostly gold, nickel, and / or iron that's supposedly worth
| many times more than the entire global economy. Pretty sure
| that anything we have here on Earth also exists "out there"
| in _much_ greater abundance than we could ever possibly
| imagine here on our finite little speck of a planet (except
| maybe "life", which we only have absolute _proof_ of here
| on Earth).
| adrian_b wrote:
| In the whole Earth the abundances of the elements are
| similar to the averages of the Solar System, with the
| exception of some volatile elements, most of them being
| non-metals, which have been lost in space during the
| condensation of the Earth and also later.
|
| However the Earth is made of layers with different
| chemical compositions and many elements are concentrated
| in layers that are too far from the surface to hope that
| we will ever reach them. So in the accessible part of the
| Earth, close to the surface, those elements are seriously
| depleted.
|
| Some asteroids, unlike the Earth, have never been melted.
| In that case their composition is homogeneous, similar to
| the averages of the Solar System. Other asteroids are
| broken parts from the cores of bigger planets, so they
| have a composition like in the Earth at very high depths.
|
| However, in the latter kind of asteroids the useful
| metals are dissolved as tiny percentages in an iron-
| nickel-cobalt-germanium alloy. This will make their
| extraction incredibly energy-consuming. On Earth such
| metals have been separated during millions of years from
| their surrounding minerals and they have been accumulated
| as native nuggets or metallic sulfides that are very easy
| to process for their final separation and purification.
|
| With the alloy that exists in planet cores and asteroids
| nobody has demonstrated an efficient separation method
| yet. The laboratory methods used for such separations use
| huge amounts of water and acids and they will be
| impossible to implement on an asteroid. Carrying raw
| metal from asteroids, which is almost completely iron,
| would also increase the costs tremendously.
|
| So it is absurd to even consider asteroid mining before
| demonstrating a method that can extract the metals from
| iron at the mining sites and with a minimum consumption
| of energy and of non-recyclable reactants.
| yowzadave wrote:
| > gold, nickel, and / or iron that's supposedly worth
| many times more than the entire global economy
|
| You hear these statements sometimes about asteroid
| mining, and they betray a misunderstanding of the way
| economies work. The reason gold/etc. is expensive is
| because it is scarce. If we suddenly have an abundance of
| these materials, then they will be cheap. The intrinsic
| value of these metals is not worth multiples of the
| global economy.
| DennisP wrote:
| For precious metals that doesn't necessarily mean it's
| not worth going to get them in large quantities. Aluminum
| used to be more precious than gold. Now we make airplanes
| out of it.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Soda cans too!
| beerandt wrote:
| It's a pretty good example with the difference being
| energy to retrieve vs energy to refine.
|
| Even with/if there's a 'flood the market' eventuality,
| you'd have approx multiple generations for the market to
| grow and mature, improving the associated technologies
| along the way, and wealth generated orders beyond the
| Carnegies Rockefellers and Vanderbilts combined.
| dhosek wrote:
| I've had an idea for a sci fi story lurking in the back
| of my head of an earth-based cartel sabotaging space
| mining to preserve the value of their precious metals.
| The catch is being able to communicate the economics in a
| way that's both accurate and entertaining.
| blooalien wrote:
| As long as you double-check it's work, you could always
| ask an LLM for help with some of that, maybe? I'd install
| something local like Ollama or somesuch and download one
| of the larger more popular more recent models and give it
| an appropriate system prompt related to being a "writing
| assistant" or something like that. Then bounce ideas off
| it and maybe throw a few related articles at it for
| "context" to work with. It's one of the things a lotta
| recent LLMs are actually useful for and somewhat good at.
| dhosek wrote:
| Nah, I'm the kind of writer who views using a thesaurus
| as cheating. I have no interest in LLM nonsense for my
| writing.
| notfish wrote:
| What? Carbonaceous chondrites (the toyota corolla of
| asteroids) are like .1ppm gold, whereas Earth's crust is
| ~0.005ppm
|
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf
| adrian_b wrote:
| Carbonaceous chondrites are bodies that have never
| aggregated into a big planet, so their chemical
| composition is close to the average composition of the
| Solar System.
|
| They are extremely numerous, but most of them are
| extremely small. Changing the spaceship orbit to catch
| one of them, which might have a few tons only in rare
| cases, will provide only a few grams at most of useful
| elements, far too little for the energy spent to achieve
| this.
|
| Mining a big asteroid that is a fragment of the core of a
| former bigger planet has much more chances to be
| worthwhile, but even for that nobody has gives any
| suggestion yet for how to separate the mined metals from
| iron and nickel at the extraction place, otherwise the
| transportation of the raw alloy would also need too much
| energy.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The average content of gold and silver and of platinum-
| group metals is very similar in the whole Earth and in the
| rest of the bodies of the Solar System.
|
| Nevertheless, in the crust that covers the _surface_ of the
| Earth, the abundances of gold and silver and of platinum-
| group metals are many orders of magnitude lower than their
| average abundances in the Solar System.
|
| For instance most of the silver has remained in deep parts
| of the mantle when the crust has formed, so silver is 11
| times less abundant at the surface of the Earth than in the
| Solar System.
|
| Gold and the platinum-group metals have gone to even higher
| depths, in the iron kernel. So at the surface gold is
| almost 300 times less abundant than in the Solar System,
| rhenium almost 600 times and nickel more than 900 times
| less abundant than in the Solar System, palladium around
| 3000 times, platinum and ruthenium around 5500 times and
| osmium and iridium around 50000 times less abundant than in
| the Solar System.
|
| Similar numbers apply to all of the 8 planets that are big
| or medium-sized and also for some of the small planets and
| big satellites, because all these have been melted at some
| point in their history, when all the metals with high
| affinity to iron or sulfur have gone to inaccessible depths
| below the surface of those planets.
|
| In the outer parts of the Solar System, the bodies are
| covered by thick layers of ice, but for the 4 inner planets
| the silicate crust that we see covering their surface is
| similar to the slag that forms at the surface of the iron
| smelted in an iron furnace and it is similarly depleted in
| the metals with low electropositivity.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Thank goodness there's a lot more space than earth then!
| coryrc wrote:
| Gold is a worse conductor than copper. Silver is slightly
| better per volume but worse per mass.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Surely reentering is very much not the problem?
| kibwen wrote:
| Re-entering is a very large problem. Say you've got a few
| thousand tons of material hurtling towards Earth. How do you
| get it down to the surface in a useful way? You're not just
| going to shotgun it raw into the ocean, because then you
| still have to retrieve it somehow. You're not going to land
| it with rockets, SpaceX-style, because the fuel costs would
| be astronomical. You're not going to land it with a short
| atmospheric drag followed by parachutes, Apollo-style,
| because the weight makes the energies too great (the Apollo
| command module weighed about 6 tons upon re-entry). You're
| going to need something much more sophisticated, Space
| Shuttle-style, but on a grander scale than ever, and you're
| going to need to bear the cost of putting that thing back
| into orbit every time, or you're going to need to develop
| something brand-new (like a HUGE inflatable re-entry vehicle)
| or something that exists in the realm of sci-fi (like a space
| elevator).
| tzs wrote:
| Does it have to be _hurtling_ toward Earth? How about first
| parking it at the L4 or L5 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, and
| then nudging it so it leisurely meanders toward Earth
| instead of hurtles toward Earth?
|
| That would enter the atmosphere orders of magnitude slower
| than meteors do. Would that be enough for it to largely
| survive the fall to the surface either stay largely intact
| on impact or break up but the pieces would all be in the
| same general area?
| DennisP wrote:
| Heh that's an interesting point. It doesn't have to orbit
| the Earth, so it doesn't necessarily have lots of lateral
| velocity to burn off. It'd be interesting to work the
| numbers for just matching the Earth's velocity around the
| sun, at a distance of a few hundred kilometers.
|
| Edit: based on a quick chat with Claude Sonnet, reentry
| velocity would be about a fourth as high, but getting to
| that initial orbit in the first place makes the whole
| project significantly harder. But maybe if ablation from
| reentries became an environmental problem, and deep-space
| propulsion got really good, it'd be worthwhile.
| kibwen wrote:
| While the interplanetary transfer network is real (https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...
| ), getting a payload onto the network itself requires a
| large and varying amount of energy based on where your
| asteroid is located. And then once you've successfully
| gotten your giant rock of solid platinum to some Earth-
| Sun Lagrange point, you still need to manage its descent
| to Earth, and beyond the technical difficulties of trying
| to steer it precisely, the superpowers of the world are
| unlikely to be peachy keen on the idea of a private
| company having global orbital bombardment capabilities,
| which is going to be a political headache of its own.
| DennisP wrote:
| Starship has a return capacity of 50 tons.[0] If you have
| 5000 tons of material to return, that's a hundred Starship
| flights.
|
| I wouldn't expect asteroid mining to be viable until we
| have Starship or something like it at scale, doing
| thousands of launches per year. If most of those flights
| return empty, then that's a lot of cargo space already
| available.
|
| Starship uses $1 million in fuel to launch 100 tons to LEO,
| so half that much should be plenty to take 50 tons back
| down. But Starship's propellant mass for launch is 2600
| tons[1] so that'd be up to thirteen launches to put the
| landing fuel in orbit. Actually it'd be less, since a lot
| of the orbital velocity is burned off by atmospheric
| breaking, not sure how much.
|
| Ideally though, get the fuel from the same asteroids you're
| mining already. Starship uses methane, so you're just
| looking for water ice and carbon, both abundant in
| asteroids.
|
| At current prices, 5000 tons of gold is worth about $400
| _billion_ , so it's not obvious that this wouldn't be
| economical. The world mines about 3000 tons of gold
| annually and the price of gold has still been going up, so
| if our asteroid miner returns a couple thousand tons per
| year it might not crash the price too badly.
|
| [0] https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_lau/super-heavy-
| starship.htm
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
| kibwen wrote:
| Gold is the worst example because the price of gold is
| almost 100% based on its scarcity. Doubling the supply of
| gold would just cause the price to roughly halve.
| Hilariously, if you actually _had_ the capability to
| inundate the world with gold, you 'd find it much easier
| and still extremely profitable to extort the people who
| own gold to pay you _not_ do so.
| DennisP wrote:
| You'd make a lot of money on the way to doubling the
| world's supply. 3000 tons annually just doubles how much
| we mine, not how much we have; that's more like 190,000
| tons. And even if you doubled the total supply instantly,
| you'd now own half the current value of the world's gold,
| which would be about $6 trillion.
|
| And of course gold has all sorts of really useful
| properties, so long term, it'd be worthwhile to make it
| abundant and cheap.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Might make sense for Mars or a moon base too.
| theptip wrote:
| I don't think this is categorically true. A couple obvious
| options are constructing titanium gliders to land materials on
| earth, and de-orbiting incoming metal loads with a space tether
| to provide inertia that can then be used to launch planetary
| loads to orbit.
|
| It's true that the relative value of these materials will be
| higher in space (since your alternative is lifting it out of
| the gravity well) but there may be so much supply that you can
| saturate the space market and justify the extra transport cost
| to sell it on earth too.
| datadeft wrote:
| Citation needed. Moving the biggest polluters from Earth to
| space makes a lot of sense. I am not sure about economic
| realities.
| kibwen wrote:
| To be clear, I think there's a lot of reasons to do cool
| things in space (Moon base, etc.). However, we're kidding
| ourselves if we think one of those reasons is "make a profit
| based on the intrinsic economic value of the endeavor".
| tejtm wrote:
| This neglects the cost of extraction. In particular, the most
| rare (and therefore precious) commodity in the solar system and
| indeed the universe is the 4 billion year old bioreactor we
| refer to as "topsoil".
|
| Getting all the other elemental material we need without
| screwing that up will be a win for our descendants.
| nradov wrote:
| The topsoil lost from mining is miniscule compared to other
| causes. Most mines aren't even located in places that could
| be used as productive farmland.
| solardev wrote:
| Can't we just shape the mined platinum into rods and drop them
| into the oceans from orbit? Or onto rival mining companies, for
| that matter?
| vosper wrote:
| Often referred to as Rods from God, but Syndicate Wars had
| the better name: Satellite Rain.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Rare earth metals might be a good use case....say the stuff
| used in cytalitic converters etc
| daymanstep wrote:
| Rare earth metals are not actually rare.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I think it makes a lot of sense. You leave the earth light and
| you return heavy and have a gravity assist to return it to
| earth for free.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Bringing stuff down from space is not that expensive with
| reusable systems like Starship, and this is even more true if
| you don't need to soft land it (i.e., spray an ablative on a
| huge rock of precious metals and let it re-enter). Asteroids
| can be re-directed to Earth for delta V costs that are quite
| small. There's no fundamental physics barrier here.
| therediterator wrote:
| The cost of getting the asteroid to orbit, transportation (back
| and forth), and mining it would be too much. Even if we do this,
| keeping in mind that we can find some elements that we are aware
| of, I think it is way more important for humanity overall to
| execute this mission because there is always an upside that we
| can discover something that is much more valuable just like the
| company can sell the piece of just an asteroid as a souvenir.
| inamberclad wrote:
| I recently did an interview with them and found their perspective
| to be a little... flippant? A bunch of screw NASA, we sleep in
| the office, etc etc. I admit that I only spoke with one person in
| the company but it was enough that I realized it wasn't the work
| environment I wanted for myself. Regardless, I wish them all the
| best.
| devit wrote:
| Using the rocket equation, it is possible to compute the ratio
| between the $kg launch cost and $/kg material sell price that
| would make it economical.
|
| Based on my calculations, with optimistic assumptions (including
| the asteroid being made solely of the desired material), you need
| 5 Falcon 9 launches and in-space assembly to bring back one ton
| of material, which would require selling the material for
| 350k$/kg for parity. But gold is only 80k$/kg, platinum is
| 30$/kg, etc.
|
| Doesn't look feasible with current technology.
| Teever wrote:
| Can you share your calculations and assumptions that go into
| them?
| withinboredom wrote:
| > Doesn't look feasible with current technology.
|
| If you don't pay the demanded price before it arrives in orbit,
| it will be delivered a full speed on your lawn. Your entire
| city will be destroyed.
| AwaAwa wrote:
| This gives me the same vibes as OceanGate's Titan, and Boeing's
| Starliner capsule.
|
| Better these two as a role model than Theranos though.
|
| Obviously the lack of any squishy humans that need to be part of
| the process makes it less of an issue when nothing comes of it.
| MarketingJason wrote:
| I'm no rocket scientist, but to me it makes sense to try and
| redirect asteroids to enter our atmosphere. The only thing I'd
| seek to "mine" on the asteroid is H2O, Hydrogen, or something
| that could be immediately converted to power/propulsion by the
| unit-itself.
|
| I guess one risk would be introducing unknown biological or
| chemical nastiness. Another would be how precise we could be to
| target open ocean/desert/etc.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That's insanely irresponsible. Even if everything goes
| perfectly you're going to have volcano tier dust plumes
| altering the local climate and in the worst case you could kill
| millions of people by wiping out entire cities.
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