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posted by martyb on Thursday November 09 2017, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-over-your-head dept.

One expert... in the field of asteroid mining, has predicted that asteroid mining could begin in 10-20 years:

"Asteroid mining on a regular basis, such as terrestrial mining takes place today, with an established industry and an ecosystem of supporting services businesses for the mining companies, could start anywhere from 20 to 50 years is my personal opinion. But any industry must start somewhere, and I think we will see the first asteroid being mined 10 to 20 years from now, at which point the surrounding ecosystem will begin to grow," [J.L.] Galache said.

However, in order to successfully start asteroid mining, a few obstacles must first be overcome. One of these is insufficient knowledge about certain types of asteroids. Although our understanding of asteroids as a whole is advanced enough, gaining a better understanding of the nature of various types of near-Earth objects could be a critical factor in terms of success. Galache underlined that mining techniques will have to be tailored to specific types of asteroids. "For example, you will not send the same equipment to mine an iron-nickel asteroid as you would a carbonaceous asteroid, and you will not send the same equipment to mine a fine regolith-covered asteroid as a rubble pile. I do believe we have figured out what all the unknowns are and it is just a matter of finding answers and solutions to those unknowns," he noted.

NASA's Psyche mission will visit 16 Psyche, the most massive metallic M-type asteroid in the asteroid belt.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday November 09 2017, @08:42PM (14 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday November 09 2017, @08:42PM (#594824)

    What's the problem you're trying to solve, again?
    What are the odds of success, the odds of catastrophic failure, and the ROI?

    Outside of a few people with extra disposable cash buying space diamonds for their mistress, how does asteroid mining compete with the thousands to millions of tons or ore extracted every year on the planet?

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @08:52PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @08:52PM (#594830)

    1. Great source of material for building in space, probably much less fuel needed to mine compared to launching off Earth's surface
    2. Might find some rare materials.
    3. Reduce the environmental impact.
    4. Humanity needs a new goal before we tear ourselves apart.
    5. It is coooool

    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:18PM (6 children)

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:18PM (#594838) Journal

      3. Reduce the environmental impact.

      Well, no. Relocate the environmental impact from our home planet to the asteroid mining site. It seems the total environmental impact would be greater for a space mining job vs. a local one, but the benefit comes from moving much of that environmental impact to a place where the environment literally doesn't matter to any intelligent life.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:41PM (3 children)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:41PM (#594856)

        When we use the word "environment" in this context, we're not using it as a synonym for "vicinity", we're really talking about the ecological impact of something.

        There is no ecology of any kind on an asteroid, so there is no "environmental impact" to asteroid mining (unless you have a big accident when trying to get the refined ores back to Earth...).

        • (Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Friday November 10 2017, @12:59AM

          by SpockLogic (2762) on Friday November 10 2017, @12:59AM (#594951)

          There is no ecology of any kind on an asteroid, so there is no "environmental impact" to asteroid mining (unless you have a big accident when trying to get the refined ores back to Earth...).

          Now what was it that the NOSTROMO accidentally tried to bring back to earth ...

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        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 10 2017, @06:00PM (1 child)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 10 2017, @06:00PM (#595232) Journal

          Actually, once building mines in the asteroids starts, pollution out there *is* going to be undesirable. Too much small stuff really limits the speed you can use.

          That said, it might be possible to solve the matter by giving a hunk that you aren't using a strong electrostatic charge. Not sure whether it should be positive or negative, I tend to think negative, because I think ionizing radiation (i.e., UV) will tend to knock off electrons, so you need a really low power ion emitter that only emits protons (or positrons, but be reasonable). Wouldn't need much power, you could probably run it on solar cells beyond Jupiter's orbit. Then various electrostatic processes would attract all the negatively charged matter and even, I believe, neutral matter (Van der Waals?). You wouldn't want it to be fast, so you don't want something powerful, just enduring. And, of course, it would repel positively charged matter from the area, but that would be less effective.

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          • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday November 10 2017, @08:26PM

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday November 10 2017, @08:26PM (#595328)

            There's different kinds of pollution. In earth-based mining, one big problem is "tailings": all the leftovers from the earth dug up after the valuable ores are removed. They tend to be full of a lot of other not-so-desirable materials like arsenic and mercury, plus you have to put them somewhere, and so they cause problems with the ecology on the surface. In space, there's no ecosystem to worry about polluting; you just have to dump the tailings somewhere. What you talk of might be a concern for smaller asteroids, but if you're mining on a larger body that has at least a little bit of gravity, it should be OK: the tailings will just stay with the body. Many asteroids are what's called "rubble piles", where they're nothing more than a bunch of small rocks being held together by their mutual gravitation; it doesn't take something the size of the Moon to have enough gravity for stuff to not just fly off into space and create a dust cloud. But I guess it would be a really bad idea to indiscriminately use high explosives to blast smaller asteroids.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday November 10 2017, @01:55AM (1 child)

        by frojack (1554) on Friday November 10 2017, @01:55AM (#594982) Journal

        Well, no. Relocate the environmental impact from our home planet to the asteroid mining site.

        Not the way that works.

        The impact on the earth of making and lifting all that equipment will exceed by orders of magnitude the value of the exacted materials.
        And after you mine it, you have to build a factory in space to process it and make it useful for SOMETHING. And of course you have to mine more stuff on earth and lift that into space to build the factory.

        Just about ALL the impact will happen here on earth. Just about none of the benefit will accrue here.

        (Other than separating some Tycoons from their money and spreading that among those working in the mines and factories and rocket industry here on earth - which some would value, right gewg_?).

        We do not now have the ability to get a single person to the moon. The idea that we can land a mining machine on an asteroid is ridiculous. The idea this happens in 10 years is absurd.

        Bad enough you have hopelessly depressed people, who after a life time of someone else wiping their ass, suggesting we need to get off the earth within 600 years because we are all going to burn up when the sun novas. Now we have "experts in an imaginary field" telling us just how to do it.

        FFS people! We are no where near starvation, we use less farmland now world wide than we did 100 or 200 years ago, we have cleaner air and water, we've got millions of tons of metals laying around in our garbage dumps free for re-use, we are getting off of fossil fuels. And some clown pretends to be an expert in something nobody has done, and half of you take it seriously!?? Unbe-fucking-lievable!

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        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 10 2017, @06:06PM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 10 2017, @06:06PM (#595235) Journal

          You are accurately describing the early phase of the project. Once manufacturing in space takes off it would reduce the need to build stuff on Earth. And lowering something from space to earth isn't nearly as polluting as lifting it off...by several orders of magnitude. But the main effect would probably be on stuff built for use in space, or on other bodies than Earth.

          Once it got going this would have a large effect on aero-space, but probably a lot less on anything else until a *much* later phase. But I wouldn't want to speculate about the time frame, as even the first stage is going to depend on a lot of technical advances.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:21PM (4 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:21PM (#594841) Journal

    When Elon Musk started SpaceX he was not expecting any ROI. He thought it might completely fail. I just watched a video about this, and heard it from his own mouth.

    Now it is funny that SpaceX is in an enviable position. It has 16 launches (so far) [wikipedia.org] this year. Commercial launches lined up for years. Seems to be hitting its stride. Setbacks seem to be fewer and lesser. And during all that, SpaceX has also managed to make big plans for the future.

    Will there be someone similar who will pioneer asteroid mining? I suspect so.

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    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 10 2017, @01:58AM (3 children)

      by frojack (1554) on Friday November 10 2017, @01:58AM (#594985) Journal

      Why would they?

      If we could technically do it today, there would still be no economic reason to do so.

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      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday November 10 2017, @03:03PM (2 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 10 2017, @03:03PM (#595137) Journal

        I don't have numbers to back this up. But I'll suggest two economic reasons for mining asteroids.

        1. Each pound of Iron, Aluminum, etc may be cheap on earth. But it suddenly becomes worth a whole lot more once boosted to orbit and beyond. As we start to construct structures in space, in orbit, or even on other planetary bodies (Mars, Moon) it may be cheaper to mine from asteroids. It may even be cheaper to land asteroid metals on a planetary body than to lift them from Earth.

        2. Rare earth metals are . . . . wait for it . . . Rare! Hard to come by on Earth. It may be economically viable, at some point, to get rare earth metals from an asteroid where they may be far more plentiful. eg, vastly cheaper per pound, even landed on Earth.

        It may not be economically viable today. At some point it will be.

        There is oil that we are extracting today that once was considered not economically viable to drill for.

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        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 10 2017, @05:22PM (1 child)

          by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 10 2017, @05:22PM (#595207)

          > But it suddenly becomes worth a whole lot more once boosted to orbit and beyond. As we start to construct structures in space,
          > in orbit, or even on other planetary bodies (Mars, Moon) it may be cheaper to mine from asteroids.

          And you're lifting up there the half-billion dollar transformation plant, which takes the 10%, 1% or even 0.01% concentrated ore, and produces element-pure ingots through complex refining processes, right?
          Just because they're in space doesn't mean that the lumps of rock are pure usable elements.
          Once extracted, you also need to make those elements useful, typically by mixing up alloys... Another dirty specialized resource-intensive process.

          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday November 10 2017, @08:25PM

            by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 10 2017, @08:25PM (#595325) Journal

            I am aware of that, and have considered it. As we construct structures in space, on a big enough scale, building the infrastructure for refining mined rocks becomes just one small part of a much larger infrastructure of construction. It would inevitably become economically attractive to mine asteroids. At some point.

            --
            People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 10 2017, @02:02PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday November 10 2017, @02:02PM (#595118)

    Millions of tons of what? If (BIG IF) a NEO is covered in relatively pure coltan (currently trading at $120/kg) it could be very economically feasible to just fly out there and redirect a couple of tons of it to fall in the deep Australian interior - and it would make a hell of a military demonstration in the process.

    Of course, gold is trading at $40K/kg, and platinum at $30K/kg, so if you've got an asteroid that's even 1% rich in those, that's another great target for a big earth-fall mining operation.

    The idea of refining the precious metals in space and then soft-landing them would seem to be much further out.

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