A NASA grant will explore the possibility of flying small robotic craft onto asteroids in order to harvest them and manufacture rudimentary propulsion that would allow the rock to be steered to another location in the solar system:
A few decades from now, asteroids may be flying themselves to mining outposts in space, nobly sacrificing their abundant resources to help open the final frontier to humanity. That's the vision of California-based company Made In Space, which was recently awarded NASA funding to investigate how to turn asteroids into giant, autonomous spacecraft. The project, known as RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), is part of Made In Space's long-term plan to enable space colonization by helping make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable.
[...] The converted asteroids wouldn't resemble the traditional idea of spacecraft, with rocket engines and complex electronic circuitry. Rather, everything would be mechanical and relatively primitive. For example, the computer would be analog, akin, perhaps, to the Antikythera mechanism invented by the ancient Greeks to chart the motion of heavenly bodies, Dunn said. And the propulsion system might be some sort of catapult that launches boulders or other material off the asteroid in a controlled way, thereby pushing the space rock in the opposite direction (as described by Newton's Third Law of Motion), he added. "At the end of the day, the thing that we want the asteroid to be is technology that has existed for a long time. The question is, 'Can we convert an asteroid into that technology at some point in the future?'" Dunn said. "We think the answer is yes."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2016, @07:55PM
And I Have Touched The Sky
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday June 07 2016, @09:27PM
Indeed, I thought of this Star Trek: TOS episode [wikia.com] immediately after reading this. But consider also the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Rise" [wikia.com].
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1) by stretch611 on Wednesday June 08 2016, @12:08PM
I also thought of the TOS episode immediately when reading this.
However, as a big Star Trek fan/geek/nerd, I am happy that most of my Voyager memories have been purged from my brain to miss the 2nd reference.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday June 08 2016, @06:46PM
A pity. I rather like Voyager.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday June 08 2016, @04:23PM
From TFS (emphasis added.)
Did nobody else make a connection between the name of this project and the classic sci-fi story Rendezvous with Rama [wikipedia.org] by Arthur C. Clarke:
If you've not read it before, I cannot recommend it too highly. I found it to be quite the page-turner.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:00PM
First off nothing is actually happening, just a small grant for some dweebs to sit around and brainstorm and produce some fan art to feed to the media.
Second, they are on crack. Microchips are a hell of a lot simpler for this purpose than trying to build anything analog. You could ship a hundred pounds of controllers, transceivers and actuators and replace a heck of a lot of trying to build stuff from local material. We already know we can fly computing hardware in the deepest space for decades. Solved problem, so why introduce additional uncertainty and complexity?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:05PM
So they have all the qualifications of a unicorn startup, then?
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday June 07 2016, @09:12PM
It takes a world full of unicorns to believe in a return on investment: the whole point is that the "ONLY" need to find an asteroid that's big enough to be detected, close enough and with the right trajectory to be reached, yet small enough that we could noticeably change it trajectory in a human-scale time.
I found one and already built a bridge on it. But since the gravity is so low, I don't use it, so it's for sale.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JNCF on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:52PM
Part of an objects use-value is determined by its potential energy. Water at the top of a tower is worth more to us than water at ground level, because you can run a generator while bringing the water down but you have to run a motor to bring it up. If spacefaring civilzations coexist with market economies at some future point, you can bet on minerals being worth more in orbit than they are at the bottom of a gravity well. If we can build a computer using materials that are already floating in space, rather than ones that we have to burn fuel bringing there, that would be ideal. This is a long-term project.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday June 07 2016, @09:24PM
Yes, but a gram of microchip is worth many pounds of mechanical computer. Plus you'd have to ship a small mining rig, smelter, and 3d printer at the minimum to make said mechanical computer on the spot; much more weight than sending a small control board. While you're at it send a small ion drive, tank, and solar or nuclear power source. I wholeheartedly approve of manufacturing in space, but do it for large, heavy, low tech items like hulls, structures and fuel. Send small, light high-tech items like controllers up from the surface.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday June 07 2016, @09:46PM
Yeah, none of this makes sense for anything we're doing in 2016. At some indeterminate point in the future, space-based manufacturing should make sense for (nearly?) everything. Inbetween these extremes is the murky middle-ground you're addressing where Earth-based manufacturing has network effects that sometimes outweigh the cost of fuel, and sometimes don't.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday June 07 2016, @11:18PM
Pretty safe bet the tipover point will happen after the first million humans are living off world. Until then there won't be nearly enough people to worry about things like chip foundries in space. And certainly not on asteroids, the first one will almost certainly be built in earth orbit somewhere or on the moon. Chips are very light, making them on Earth and shipping them up won't add enough to their cost to matter. Especially if they just send wafers up and complete them in space. Such realities will be the basis for commerce between Earth and the offworld colonies.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday June 08 2016, @12:32AM
I'm not even convinced that there will necessarily be biological humans around by the time we're producing computers from scratch off planet. We could be a hivemind by then. There are some pretty obvious milestones coming up if we don't nuke ourselves back to the stone age, but it isn't clear when we'll reach them or in which order.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2016, @07:16AM
We already are a hive mind.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday June 08 2016, @04:24PM
Agree for some values of "hivemind." I see hivemindedness as something that exists on a continuum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2016, @10:35PM
You have summed up, perfectly, NIAC [nasa.gov]. It is PR wrapped up as serious funding to generate exactly these kind of stories.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 08 2016, @07:04AM
It's about steampunk.
http://www.steampunk.com/what-is-steampunk/ [steampunk.com]
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Wednesday June 08 2016, @01:51PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:04PM
> the propulsion system might be some sort of catapult that launches boulders or other material off the asteroid in a controlled way, ...
Which means lots of material in new orbits. Don't we already have a problem with too much junk in earth orbit? And now they propose putting more junk into solar orbits (probably eccentric/cometary) that might eventually come back to hit earth?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 08 2016, @07:49PM
That could be true, depending. You could envision the propulsion system ejecting high velocity b.b.s, where high velocity means it's moving at greater than solar escape velocity.
Personally I consider ion rockets a much better approach, but they ARE more difficult to build...and it's basically the same idea, just scaled down.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Gaaark on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:04PM
Reading this makes me think: we can THINK (maybe even do) something like this, but we can't even get people to get along with each other?
We could put robots on an asteroid and steer it somewhere, but we can't put a Jew and a Nazi (or whatever) into the same room and have them get along?
Hell, we can't even put a fucking geek girl and geek guy in a forum and not have the guy geek hate all over the geek girl???? I mean.... heck, geek girls are HOT and deserve utmost respect just by walking in the room (except for the non-real-geek girls who are stuck up or bitchy and not really into-the-geek-thing, they just wear glasses without the lenses to appear hot)!!! (even the non-hot ones: if you can talk to a girl about linux and not have her go all 'duh' on you............well........sheeet!!!)
And now, back to Black Sails, and Silver trying to take back the ship. Poor Randall.... :(
Love that word 'Andromache'.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:11PM
People create conflict wherever they go. You could have a population density of 1 person per asteroid, and they'd still be catapulting boulders at each other.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday June 07 2016, @09:36PM
And the reality TV show ratings for that would be awesome. Probably pay for the whole program. "Survivor: asteroid edition"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2016, @10:28AM
That is actually the untold backstory of the "game" Asteroids.
The "game" was a tool created by the Armada TV producers to recruit pilots for their asteroid survival show clean-up crew between seasons.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:34PM
deserve utmost respect just by walking in the room
No one deserves respect just for walking into a room. Get off your high horse, white knight.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday June 08 2016, @04:42AM
deserve utmost respect just by walking in the room
No one deserves respect just for walking into a room. Get off your high horse, white knight.
Perhaps not "utmost" respect, but each person deserves at least simple human respect. At least until a person shows they're not worth even that.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday June 07 2016, @08:34PM
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday June 07 2016, @09:26PM
if you can talk to a girl about linux and not have her go all 'duh' on you............well........sheeet!!!
I remember dating this girl in '94 or maybe '95 or so and she picks up a cdrom from Walnut Creek that was laying around my apartment, one of the very earliest linux cds, maybe it was a SLS distro or just a pile of source code or whatever, and she asks "Linux, huh, what do they sound like?" because she thought it was a band.
This brings up the famous (is it?) geek vs nerd dichotomy where technically I think you're using the wrong word, but whatever. Technically nerds are the "real deal" and geeks are using nerd culture as their style of the week. Much like there's actual surfers who surf, and then there's high school kids in Wisconsin who wear board shorts in the winter to look cool. Good luck getting nerds and geeks of any genders to get along, you'd have better odds with the jew and nazi reference. That's where the stuff really hits the fan, its just when the guy is a nerd and the girl is a geek suddenly its all "muh wimmens in CS, I'm so triggered in the current year!" whereas if two guys hate each other its merely "eh".
Gaaaaarks post reminds me of the last time I was drunk for some odd reason.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday June 07 2016, @10:09PM
Gaaaaarks post reminds me of the last time I was drunk for some odd reason.
Good call, my friend. Vodka smiles all round...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07 2016, @10:17PM
she asks "Linux, huh, what do they sound like?" because she thought it was a band.
Reminds me of that old joke...
"It's been said that if you play a Windows CD backwards, you'll hear satanic chanting... even worse, if you play it forwards, it installs Windows."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2016, @05:59AM
I don't know about this "mechanical" solution to space mining.
however i'll wager a bet that some "stuff" from outer space is
superior to stuff found on earth.
Ofc, barring all conspiracy theories, stuff from outer space can be placed on the periodic
table just the same.
However to conjure up a comparison between, say titanium from a asteroid and
titanium on earth it might be like milk and cheese.
Milk is just milk and would be like titanium found on earth. Titanium from a
asteroid would be like cheese: if some atoms are shave off of the lumps
of titanium from both sources then they register both as titanium.
The asteroid titanium, however has been "fermenting" in a completely different
environment. exposed to heating and cooling cycles and bombarded by cosmic and
solar winds etc. etc. for a VERY LOOONG TIME.
So there will ofc be metals superior if mined from asteroids and also stuff that is
less good then mined directly on earth.
There might even be the possibility that adding just a tiny chunk of, say, cosmic iron
from an asteroid and adding to a iron smelting crucible on earth will catalyze the whole thing ...
The periodic table is simple but not the whole story /methinks.
Just a theory ^_^
magnetic meteoric metal / meteorites added to knifes and swords
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2016, @06:39AM
>magnetic meteoric metal / meteorites added to knifes and swords
It was valuable because the Egyptians didn't know how to smelt iron. But by all means waste time looking for the naquadah deposits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08 2016, @09:52AM
I think they take "the stone age of space exploration" a little bit too literally.