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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday November 10 2017, @08:33PM (1 child)
I remember a time, long, long ago when it was thought to be impossible to land a rocket booster and re-use it.
Just ask the NASA and Congress people who said (1) impossible to re-land a rocket booster, and (2) impossible to re-use it.
Huh? When did they ever say that? Did you forget that's exactly what they did back in 1969 to land on the Moon? They had to use a small rocket engine to land without crashing, and then re-ignite it to take off again.
They just never bothered on Earth because 1) there's an atmosphere here, so landing here with a rocket is a much, much trickier problem than on the airless Moon, 2) the computing technology to do it reliably didn't exist back in the Apollo days, and 3) they were much more worried about making everything as absolutely safe as possible, with little regard to cost, so they were treating things more like racing car engines, where the engines are only used for one race before being completely rebuilt, rather than like today's cars where you drive them for 200,000 miles doing minimal maintenance and just dealing with it if there's a failure. The high cost of launches was indeed a problem which, given the large number of satellite launches these days, invited new thinking from the private sector.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 13 2017, @04:09PM
I don't think it was NASA in an official capacity. But it was someone at NASA who, as you point out, should know better.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.