Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 19 2015, @03:26AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Sunday July 19 2015, @03:26AM (#210953)

    Indeed - and considering the thousands of dollars per pound it takes to ship something to orbit (probably only hundreds by the point that asteroid mining becomes viable), the price of the resource on Earth is mostly irrelevant. Sure, you might ship down some of the rare metals like gold and platinum, and maybe even make enough to pay for the mission that way, but most of the ore would be far more valuable in orbit. Especially stuff like iron, carbon, etc - the raw materials to build the bulk structure of ships and orbital facilities. If you can build giant shielded metal cans in orbit, then shipping up the computers, engines, etc. to turn them into space stations/ships is fairly cheap. Eventually you'd want to build most things in orbit, but there's no reason we couldn't boot-strap the process by installing modular high-tech components in a relatively crude chassis.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2