Space Mining Thread

I think they will be sending robots to collect the materials, at least in the short term, so any accidents will just be unfortunately expensive, rather than deadly to humans out there.

Although eventually, and this is the greatest part about space mining, is that the materials are already in space - so it becomes way cheaper to build stuff in orbit rather than having to build it on the ground and then launch it with a ton of fuel. This could start paving the way for a true space age, where we start having space craft docks like in star trek, just floating around in orbit... now that would be something I'd love to see.

 

Asteroids are actually very far apart, typically. A collision would be quite rare.

 

in addition to them being so far away, because this company is basically launching a fleet of telescopes, we will be way more able to track all of the orbits and trajectories of these asteroids and if we're watching them, it will be pretty obvious if they are shifted off course in a dangerous direction.

 

Yeah, actual asteroid 'fields' would be similar in scale to having two sugar-grain-sized pebbles on the entirety of the Midwest plains.
And that'd be considered packed.

I vaguely remember some BBC interview with one of these guys saying how the plans may involve influencing the asteroids to crash into the moon so that mining them would not have a time-sensitive window of opportunity.
Ergo, Moon Base.


There was also some breakfast news segment with one guy blabbing on about how ludicrously expensive this all was and another guy just said, "If you knew there was a diamond the size of New York floating around out there, wouldn't YOU want it?"
I totally snort-laughed into my cereal.

 

Unfortunately, as much as people want space elevators to exist (I know I do), they are and will be for the foreseeable future, impossible. Even if we ever are able to make carbon fiber cable, hundreds of miles long, get it intoe space, hang it from a satellite in perfect geo-synchronous orbit, there is still a huge problem. The Ozone layer. The upper atmosphere of our planet, is filled with acidic o-zone molecules that would eat right through any kind of cable we could make, let alone a solid carbon one (very attractive target for O3 to bond to)

 

Which would cost trillions of dollars, money of which nobody has right now.
Space Elevator is a no for at least another century or two.

 

This is true.

 

the point of using carbon fiber is that it's the only material strong and light enough to not break under its own weight...if you coat it in something that will no longer be true, as there are no other materials known to be as strong and light.

 

well actually, this is where space mining has the ability to totally change everything with regard to space costs. If we can mine iron and water IN space, we don't need tons of rocket fuel just to get it into orbit - it'll be complicated, and we will need to rethink how we manufacture things, but if we can launch just enough material into orbit to build a space factory, we could start refining iron and making steel in orbit. With all the raw materials already up there, we just have to send up a few robots and power tools to assemble the ships and space stations and whatever else we wanna make up there. In no time, we'll have the ability to build huge, much heavier and more solid space ships than we have ever been able to make before, and then the only rocket fuel we need is to launch people into orbit to dock with the already built ships.

 

Its a brilliant idea. Asteroids often have useful metals in them. As stated above...

 

Asteroid Mining is merely all politics. If money were not an object and we had a much better space program instead of launching satellites into space, we could be on mars right now. It is an overall brilliant idea but we seem to be caught up in petty squabbles that seem to reduce our ability to...well...explore our solar system and make that technological jump so that terraforming and mining could be possible. It all sounds Sci Fi at the moment, but this is completely possible.

With our sudden technological jump since the end of WW2, we could be able to have a manned mission of Mars by at least 2030. Colony's are possible, yet extremely difficult due to our lack of FTL drives. NASA just happens to be working on a warp speed field test as we speak thanks to a loophole in Einstein's general theory of relativity that could allow a ship to traverse vast distances in less time than it would take light. According to Einstein's theory, an object with mass cannot go as fast or faster than the speed of light. Remember, Space doesn't have mass. And we know that it's flexible: space has been expanding at a measurable rate ever since the Big Bang.

 

I love the idea of venturing out into space. When I was a young boy, I looked up into the night sky on a camping trip and saw the stars, and it hit me; those stars are all places that you can go to! Every single one of them is not merely a twinkling light set there for our pleasure, but is in fact a ball of gas father away than I could guess. I still often look up into the stars and wonder when I might be free to explore, to truly know what it feels like to set out on a great adventure. Maybe never, but the idea occupies my writings and thoughts often.

Unfortunately for Einstein, he did not know what we know about the forces that shape the universe, though he did know more than many of his time. We of our time have the benefits of the knowledge of Schrodinger, Born, Bohr and Heisenberg. Ah! I do love physics.

Also, this link should go in this thread: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/index.html#.UdXJq22uqqk

 

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