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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 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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