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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the gonna-take-a-trip-on-my-favorite-rocket-ship dept.

The asteroid-mining industry has taken a step closer to becoming an actual thing, with the successful deployment of Planetary Resources' Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft from the International Space Station Wednesday night. The A3R's three-month mission will be used to test and validate some basic technologies that the company hopes to incorporate in future spacecraft that will prospect near-Earth asteroids for potentially valuable resources.

"Our philosophy is to test often, and if possible, to test in space," says Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki. "The A3R is the most sophisticated, yet cost-effective, test demonstration spacecraft ever built."

The small craft was sent to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 resupply mission in April. On Wednesday (July 15), it was sent out the Kibo airlock to begin checking out its avionics, control systems and software, among other systems. It will be followed up by the Arkyd-6 (A6), another demonstrator set to launch later this year. The larger A6 will check out next-generation attitude control, power and communication systems, as well as the sensors that will be used to detect resources with good potential for mining.

When I was a kid I found a science fiction novel on the shelves in a cabin in Glacier National Park entitled, "Assignment in Space with Rip Foster," in which the heroes try to steer an asteroid of pure thorium back to Earth orbit. The cover of the book was hokey, but the story was one of the better "science" science fiction stories I've read, in the sense that there were no magical technologies to make everything easy to accomplish; there was just plain old rocketry and physics. But as interesting as the concept of asteroid mining is, wouldn't the fabulous costs and potential to crash commodities markets once you brought something back to Earth defeat the profit motive?


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:27PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:27PM (#210886) Journal

    But as interesting as the concept of asteroid mining is, wouldn't the fabulous costs and potential to crash commodities markets once you brought something back to Earth defeat the profit motive?

    Depends on the situation. Demand can go up a lot. It's not like we'll stop using these materials because they became cheaper. For example, if aluminum becomes cheap enough, it'll be a ready replacement for steel where weight would be an issue. Instead of steel bridges or boat hulls, maybe you'll have aluminum ones. If gold or platinum become cheap enough, then one might use them as a protective or gaudy structure coating. Silver would replace copper in electrical wiring. And so on.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:48PM (#210891)

    There is also the fact that to upset the commodities market you would have to bring in materials on a massive scale. For instance, platinum is one of the rarer resources we are relatively likely to find a decent supply of in the asteroid belt, but we natively produce rougly 500,000 kilograms of it per year. Massive fleets would be necessary to make this happen, which would require manufacturing capabilities in space due to the costs of launching from earth. Designing a decent space mining robot isn't the problem, the problem is manufacturing them natively in space.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:21AM

      by tftp (806) on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:21AM (#210909) Homepage

      On top of that it remains to be seen what kind of geology we find within the asteroid belt. Chances are that most of it will be very similar to the known composition of Earth and other planets. Perhaps if the belt is the remains of the planet between Mars and Jupiter then we can access deeper layers of it and then maybe we can find something tasty. If the belt was formed from dust but never coalesced into a planet, then its geology would be different. But in either case what's the chance that we find an asteroid that is entirely made from something useful and easy to mine? Gold is present on Earth, but it requires some serious machinery and chemistry and power to extract. None of that would be available on an asteroid.

      Not to say that it's impossible - but it will be very expensive to mine asteroids with today's technology - and perhaps within the nearest 50 years. The last big jump in energy use was in 1900's when an ICE was invented. We are still running on that plateau. The next jump would be about invention of small, lightweight power sources - like batteries; but what we have today is two to three orders of magnitude below the desired goal (in cost, in reliability, in temperature range, in vibration resistance, etc.) Those sources would allow construction of autonomous robots - even if they are controlled remotely, or operated by primitive computers that we already have.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:51AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:51AM (#211007)

        If the belt was formed from dust but never coalesced into a planet, then its geology would be different.

        I never understood this hypothesis. Take, for instance, solid iron asteroids & meteorites found here on Earth. Does it make any sense that a cloud of dust will just happen to be almost completely iron, and that the small size of the rock somehow had the massive gravity required to heat and fuse the dust cloud? Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Even if dust were the building blocks, the dust balls would have to have become at least proto-planet sized first for the pressure / molten state to occur and thus stratify the materials. Then when a few of these larger sized objects collided they could be shattered apart to produce the type of asteroids we see. It just doesn't make any sense to me that a body made of dust that's not large enough to create enough heat and pressure for molten states of matter would collide with another big ball of dust and produce a rather uniformly distributed chunk of material. I suppose the collisions of dust balls, be they big and fast enough, could yield the heat required to briefly produce some molten materials, but given that the input was randomly arranged dust the resulting asteroids wouldn't have a uniform internal composition. We're talking "dust" not atoms, so gravity alone wouldn't stratify it.

        However, if you start with a big ball of hydrogen gas big enough to ignite and begin fusing into heavier elements, then blow THAT apart, you might have had some stratified layers or perhaps even more interesting structures formed according to magnetic properties. Point being: There is no evidence that everything coming out of a nova will be "dust". At the distances we observe a nebula what we perceive as a "dusty cloud" could be (and very likely is) rather chunky up close. If nothing else, asteroid mining will help us weed out incorrect guesses as to how our solar system was formed -- such as this "asteroid made of dust" bullshit.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday July 27 2015, @01:41PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 27 2015, @01:41PM (#214298) Journal

        If the belt was formed from dust but never coalesced into a planet, then its geology would be different.

        While there's still considerable uncertainty about the Asteroid Belt, it is known to have a lot of stratification and sorting. For example, Vesta, the second largest asteroid, has a very high metal content while there are other asteriods with high silica or high carbon/organic content (these three broad categories cover most known asteroids and meteorites).

        The next jump would be about invention of small, lightweight power sources - like batteries; but what we have today is two to three orders of magnitude below the desired goal (in cost, in reliability, in temperature range, in vibration resistance, etc.) Those sources would allow construction of autonomous robots - even if they are controlled remotely, or operated by primitive computers that we already have.

        Sorry, you need energy. The thermodynamics of turning ore into highly refined metal and then moving it somewhere else in the Solar System requires a lot of energy, no matter what sort of technology you have. It doesn't matter if you have 1960s tech or tech indistinguishable from magic. You will need energy in order to get the metal you want at the level of purity you want at the place you want.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:51AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:51AM (#210915) Journal

      Actually, this link http://www.indexmundi.com/en/commodities/minerals/platinum-group_metals/platinum-group_metals_t5.html [indexmundi.com] says that the yearly production of platinum is about 200 tonnes.
      500 tonnes is the whole platinum group. (200 platinum, 200 palladium, 100 everything else).

      Nitpicking aside, 200 or 500 tonnes is huge for a science or test mission, but tiny for an actual mining operation.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
  • (Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:13AM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:13AM (#210906) Homepage Journal

    Indeed, changing the supply/demand equation of a commodity would be disruptive. Sure, you may devalue something, but devalue it the point that a particular use becomes economically feasible, expect demand to rise in turn.

    • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:45AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:45AM (#210928)

      DeBeers seem to do pretty well.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday July 19 2015, @03:04AM

        by Immerman (3985) on Sunday July 19 2015, @03:04AM (#210945)

        Sure, but they're playing the opposite game - acquire a strangle-hold on production to create artificial scarcity, initiate a massive long-term marketing campaign, and then make a mint selling people sparkley gravel as though it were worth something.

      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:17AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:17AM (#210994) Journal

        DeBeers seem to do pretty well.

        But that's just carbon. The stuff is everywhere, laying about with hydros and even perhaps being a little too friendly with the old O2. Nice that we can do tricks with it, like it rolling over into tiny tubes, or making layers an atom thick, but what we really need is a way to make it valuable, so that people will want to take it out of the environment, and sequester it. Kind of the opposite of the asteroid mining scenario, but just think, if we could come up with a cheap way to convert CO2 into diamonds--all our troubles would be over! Carbon markets of the future, here we come!