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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 10 2017, @02:08AM (1 child)
Sounds like we are really talking about something 50-200 years from now. Where we have mastered autonomous self-maintaining swarms of robots, ability to fabricate on-site and off-site materials “printing”, on and on… However the 50 year mark should amount to some perfection of these techniques on Earth, which would in turn eliminate any manufacturing job. Ideally build X facility should be a push button operation, we simple keep infusing more raw materials in another sci-fi way.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 10 2017, @06:25PM
Printing materials will probably always have limits. It's my guess that the limits will involve strength, but I'm not sure. Other technologies will be favored for many purposes. This isn't to say that they won't be automated, just that printing will only be one of the approaches used. I suspect that for some purposes large globs of molten metal will be required for ... if not centuries, at least the rest of this one.
That said, if energy becomes cheap enough I could see refining materials by heating them into a plasma and running them through an advanced form of mass spectroscope. But that takes really cheap energy. Fusion probably wouldn't suffice. (Well, it *would*, stars to it all the time, but not on a human scale, and they don't separate the results.)
OTOH, one really useful thing to do in space is smelt bodies for their gases, and fractionally distill those. Then you're left with a pile of sand that has lost it's glue, and you don't want to let it spill around freely where you're working, so you might want to melt the surface, and that might .... well, as things get more advanced I can see pulling off nearly all the elements in order of the temperature that they vaporise at. That would include various compounds, which would either disassociate or vaporize. But that takes a LOT of heat, so it's not one of the early steps...and may never be practical.
But when you've got masses of pure elements, printing isn't the best way to build three dimensional structures. Until you get assemblers you need to rely on machining, and modifications of all the traditional ways of handling them. (Free fall chemistry is likely to be quite different, though, except in really small batches. And nothing that depends on convection unless you spin it.)
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