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Luxembourg expands its space resources vision
Étienne Schneider, deputy prime minister of Luxembourg, frequently tells the story of how he got interested in building a space resources industry in the country. His efforts to diversify the country's economy several years ago led to a meeting with Pete Worden, at the time the director of NASA's Ames Research Center and a proponent of many far-reaching space concepts. During an Oct. 22 panel discussion at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Washington, he recalled Worden advocating for commercial space: "Why shouldn't you go for space mining activities?"
"When he explained all this to me, I thought two things," Schneider said. "First of all, what did the guy smoke before coming into the office? And second, how do I get him out of here?"
He eventually bought into Worden's vision, starting a space resources initiative that attracted companies to the country while enacting a space resources law like that in the United States. By the beginning of 2019, though, it looked like it might all be a bad trip. The two major startups in that industry, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, had been acquired by other companies with no interest in space resources. Worse, the Planetary Resources deal wiped out an investment of 12 million euros Luxembourg made in the startup.
Schneider is undaunted by those setbacks as he continues work to make Luxembourg a hotbed of entrepreneurial space, a scope that has expanded beyond, but has not abandoned, space resources. During the IAC, the country's year-old space agency signed an agreement with NASA to explore potential cooperation, building on an agreement Luxembourg signed with the U.S. Commerce Department in May. Just before the conference, Luxembourg announced it would partner with the European Space Agency on a space resources center in the country.
The article includes an interview with Schneider.
Previously: Luxembourg Announces Investment in Asteroid Mining
Related:
NASA Asteroid Mission -- Metals "Worth" Ten Thousand Quadrillion Dollars
Asteroid Mining Could Begin in 10-20 Years
"Mission Success" for Arkyd-6 Asteroid Prospecting Demonstration Spacecraft
Chinese Researchers Propose Asteroid Mining Plan, Including a Heat Shield
The U.S. Geological Survey is Beginning to Take a Serious Look at Asteroid Mining
Robotic Asteroid Mining Spacecraft Wins a Grant From NASA
Luxembourg To Be First European Country To Legalise Cannabis
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 09 2019, @02:43AM (25 children)
Once the technology is worked out?
Platinum, gold, pretty much all the rare heavy elements by the megaton. They're rare on Earth because they all settled into the core long before the lighter elements cooled and solidified on the surface. Current theory is that metallic asteroids are the cooled remnants of the metallic cores of other proto-worlds that were smashed up by collisions - which means cubic kilometers of all the heavy elements that are hard to find here, ripe for the taking.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 09 2019, @03:02AM
Platinum, gold, pretty much all the rare heavy elements by the megaton
When the production gets to megaton, it will be cheaper.
You figured out why De Beers [wikipedia.org] exist yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Disagree) by fustakrakich on Monday December 09 2019, @03:46AM (23 children)
which means cubic kilometers of all the heavy elements that are hard to find here, ripe for the taking.
I'll bet you a dollar that it would be cheaper to pump molten metals from the planet's core than it is to go prospecting millions of of miles into outer space for a few tons of uncertainty. Presently, both have an equal chance, but at least the core is a sure thing. Break the drill up there on the asteroid, who's gonna fix it?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 09 2019, @04:36AM
Team Asteroid: We can approach and "land" on asteroids.
Team Core: We'll reach 1% of the depth to the outer core some day.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 09 2019, @04:47AM
I direct my dollar of winnings to go to SN and its operation. Sorry, that assertion is ridiculous even by current space industry standards. At least in space, you can redirect an asteroid to impact Earth, and then dig those tons of uncertainty out of the crater.
But pumping stuff out of Earth's core? It's not going to be unobtanium drills made by the finest unicorns that'll do it. No, it's going to be crazy ass exotic on a planetary scale. Maybe build gray goo nanotech that takes the Earth apart. Maybe a Earth-wide sonic network rips pieces of the core loose and pull it to the surface through thousands of miles of overburden. Greg Bear shit. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 09 2019, @05:58AM (20 children)
I'd take that bet in a heartbeat. Space is an incredibly benign environment in comparison - as warm or cold as you want it to be with the help of nothing more than a big mylar umbrella, no gravity to wrestle against, and the distances are largely irrelevant unless you're in a hurry. We've already landed on them before, the hard part will be learning to mine in vacuum and micro-gravity, or alternately figuring out how to dump asteroids into Earth's gravity well without starting a war.
The Earth's core on the other hand is is about 5000km away straight down, through temperatures climbing from 1000C to 5000C. For comparison the deepest hole we've ever dug was all of 7 miles deep, and is estimated to have gotten only a third of the way through the eggshell-thin crust.
It'll be expensive getting stuff into orbit - but assuming SpaceX manages to deliver on Starship they will be bringing the costs down from $1,300/lb to $10/lb within the next decade or two.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday December 09 2019, @06:56AM (14 children)
$10/lb, that I hope to see, but in two decades? The technology is still so primitive. What kind of propulsion would work at that price?
For comparison the deepest hole we've ever dug was all of 7 miles deep
That's why I recommend we start working on that issue. We don't have to go all the way to the core. The crust can't be that barren. And tapping into all that free heat has its own benefits.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday December 09 2019, @08:58AM (12 children)
Methalox engines. Starship/Superheavy is supposed to initially have a 100Mg=220,000lb payload to LEO, using less than $1M in fuel, with an estimated $2M total launch cost once reusability goals are met. That's $10/lb right there.
The crust is barren. Think of Earth like a mud pit filled with heavy metals, that's kept warm and slowly moving for several billion years. Almost everything heavy settles to the bottom of the pit, and a froth of the lightest stuff forms on the top. That's the crust,a paltry few dozen miles of silicon and oxygen (~7.34%) with a bit of aluminum(8%), iron(5%),calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium mixed in (~24.3% total) The last 1.4% is also mostly relatively common elements - copper is around 0.01%, nickle and zinc are only present in trace amounts. The rare elements don't even register.
Compare to the core, which is thought to be mostly iron, with as much as 10% nickle, and enough gold to cover the Earth's surface more than a foot deep. All at twice the boiling (not melting) point of steel if not for the insane pressures - just at the bottom of the mantle, ~1000 miles down, it's already at 1.4 million atmospheres, and you're still dealing with an element mix believed to be very similar to the surface, though getting slightly more iron rich.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 09 2019, @11:06AM
For fusty: $10/lb is not even the bottom. 100 metric tons is the minimum it is planned to lift, 150 metric tons is the optimistic target. So it could end up being as low as $6/lb.
Add a decade or a few and we could talk about larger Starship-like rockets with slightly improved $/kg or nuclear thermal rockets.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 09 2019, @04:00PM
Oops, misplaced decimal - the Earth's crust is 73.4% silicon and oxygen
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 09 2019, @10:32PM (9 children)
Estimate the energy required to safely land a megaton of stuff from the asteroid belt on Earth. See how much methalox you'll have to burn. Don't forget the energy cost of bringing that methalox in the asteroid belt too.
Should be back-of-a-napkin computation using high school knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 10 2019, @12:00AM (8 children)
Well, you wouldn't move it all at once. And why would you bring methalox to the asteroid belt? One of the big reasons for choosing it is that you can easily synthesize it anywhere there's water and carbon, which means pretty much everywhere in the solar system.
As for the cost - delta-V between LEO and the asteroid belt is lower than between Earth's surface and LEO, so if Starship brings launch costs to LEO down to $10/kg, then you're probably looking at considerably less than that to transport stuff from the asteroid belt to LEO using the same technology. And Starship is supposed to be able to return half it's launch payload back to the surface from orbit, so call it $20/kg to land materials - assuming nobody is launching anything to orbit on the same round-trip flight. Really that's horribly wasteful though - all you really need for returning raw materials is some thermal shielding and a simple guidance system, not something capable of getting back to orbit.
But lets be conservative and call it $30/kg transportation costs from the asteroid belt to Earth's surface. Meanwhile gold is currently selling for ~$40,000/kg - even if it eventually lost 99% of its value in the face of a huge glut of asteroid riches, it'd still be selling for more than 10x the transportation costs. Plenty cost effective, no matter what the energy budget is.
And of course, rockets are a terribly inefficient way to move things through space - we use them largely because none of the more efficient ways we've come up work well in an atmosphere. But rail guns, centrifugal slings, etc. all work great in a vacuum, and would let us drastically reduce transportation costs between LEO and the Belt. Heck, it'd be handy for reentry too, if you didn't want to worry about heat shielding . Just use your orbital catapult to launch the payload backwards fast enough come to a stop relative to Earth, and you only have to shed the tiny amount of energy gained from falling a couple hundred miles. Heck, cast your metal into an airfoil shape and you could probably glide it to a nice gentle crash-landing exactly where you wanted it with just some minimal control surfaces.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 10 2019, @12:12AM (7 children)
Will you try to get Joule costs rather than $ cost?
'Cause, you know, physics is somehow more immutable than the economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:08AM (6 children)
Okay... lets just look at the specific orbital energy
Orbital specific energy for an elliptical orbit is e = -G(m1+m2)/2r
Where G is the gravitaitonal constant 6.7e−11 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2
m1 is the mass of the primary (the sun) = 2.0e30kg
m2 is negligible compared to that, and r is the semi-major axis of the orbit.
Earth's orbit = -446MJ/kg
16 Psyche orbit = -153 MJ/kg
difference = 293MJ/kg
So, to get 1kg of cargo from Earth's orbit to 16 Psyche, or back again, matching speed with the planet(oid)s at either end, takes the energy equivalent of about 2.3 gallons of gasoline (127MJ/gal U.S.)
Moving around the solar system doesn't actually take an outrageous amount of energy if you're not in a hurry. Getting off Earth's surface does, because you're throwing away a massive amount of energy just to keep from falling out of the sky. And the rocket equation makes things ugly fast. But once you're in orbit there's actually a lot of ways to avoid the rocket equation, assuming you're planning to move enough cargo to be worth building the infrastructure.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 10 2019, @02:58AM (5 children)
Twice of that energy is close to minimal energy expenditure - unless you don't care if your stuff gets delivered some centuries later, that is.
"Soft landing" is a mandatory requisite, yes. I'll assume there will be magic level science to brake the LEO->Earth without any energy expenditure (aerobraking like 1000K over hell temperature), you'll have:
1. getting the fuel for a 2-ways trip in orbit - and, gosh, the rocket-equation-like considerations eat you alive there
2. make your decision how expedited you want the asteroid/Earth delivery - cheaper will certainly add years to the delivery term
Also, don't forget the Ox side that you need for that gasoline - assuming carbon based fuel, the Ox side is about twice the mass of your carbon in that gasoline if you burn it in oxygen, maybe more if you decide to use other oxidizers (I don't know, some perchlorates in which the chlorine doesn't contribute too much at the energy budget's bottom line but still have mass).
So your "gasoline mass equiv" gets you to about (12kg/gasoline + 24kg oxidizer) per kg of "wanted payload" to be shifted back and forth over various distances (the "2.3 gallons of gasoline" have a mass of about 6kg).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 10 2019, @04:06AM (4 children)
>Twice of that energy is close to minimal energy expenditure - unless you don't care if your stuff gets delivered some centuries later, that is.
Nope. You're probably thinking of using the Interplanetary Transport Network, which takes advantage of circuitous gravitational slingshots to make the journey while spending almost zero energy (it scavenges orbital energy from the planets it slingshots) That path can indeed take a *very* long time, but might be worth considering if you wanted to move truly massive amounts of material at once for relatively low cost. Though without any nearby planets I'm not sure the Belt actually has a gravitational "on ramp" to get started.
If you're actually willing to spend the energy I listed, then you'd take a Hohmann transfer orbit, the minimum-energy direct route. One burst of acceleration to leave your first orbit on an elliptical path that just reaches the other, and another burst once you get their to circularize your orbit at the new distance. Takes half an orbit to pull off, so a year or two year between Earth and the Belt. You'd want a faster journey if you were moving radiation-sensitive cargo like people, but metal doesn't care, it's been sitting in this environment for billions of years, a couple more won't hurt it. You could go faster if you wanted to, but if you're depending on rockets you'd probably need a good reason, because twice the fuel won't get you moving anywhere close to twice as fast. You can also only make the journey when Earth is in the right alignment - so probably a few months window out of every couple years.
> Also, don't forget the Ox side that you need for that gasoline
Heck, if you're burning the gasoline in a rocket you're going to need a LOT more thanks to the rocket equation. You asked how much energy was needed - I only mentioned gasoline as a "real world" reference point. If you wanted to actually use anywhere close to that little energy you'd need a maglev "railgun" launcher, a massive centrifuge, a laser-pushing station... something that would avoid the need for reaction mass on the vehicle to avoid the rocket equation.
That's why I initially mentioned estimated Starship costs - they've already worried about the rocket equation and figured out what they think they can get the costs down to, rocket maintenance and all. The energy delivered to the payload is a small fraction of that.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 10 2019, @05:40AM (3 children)
That's what I meant, sorry for not spelling it explicitly.
(there were so many other things that were ignored. Rocket engine efficiency, the energy to mine the asteroid at destination, unfolding/assembling the "space sled" to load and send the stuff back - doesn't make sense to use the same "rocket airframe", etc)
Heck, let me spell the point I wanted to make, as clear as I can. So here I go:
"The asteroid mining at megaton scale can be theoretically done with today's usual technology (chem energy), but is so impractical that it is likely to happen only after the space propulsion turns nuclear in practical terms (as in "you'd need at least 3-orders-of-magnitude-higher-than-chem propulsion on the energy density [soylentnews.org] scale").
Until then, if you take 'asteroid mining in practical terms, starting tomorrow' seriously, it is likely you qualify in the category of intelligence that makes one prone to be parted with one's money."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 10 2019, @06:14AM (2 children)
Okay, fair enough. Let me make a counterpoint:
Unless you're chasing Bezo's dream of moving all industry off Earth, there's no really much call for moving megatons of common materials around. Nor would you necessarily want to start shipping megatons of rare metals back to Earth - you'd devastate the market. But millions of megatons are there waiting to be brought back by anyone with the capacity, in whatever quantities they can manage. If it's possible to get 1 ton of rare metal back to Earth at a handsome profit (and at $40 million per tonne for gold, transportation at least won't be a serious cost concern), then somebody is going to do it. And once they prove it can be done, it'll be a gold rush to make California look like a day-old buffet line.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 10 2019, @07:00AM (1 child)
Agreed. With the note that's a big if (and an unlikely one at the current tech level) - be it only for the reason that, to get them back, one needs to "go get it" in the first place and that's where the head-scratching starts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 10 2019, @02:22PM
I don't know about head-scratching. We've already figured out how to get there, and done so repeatedly. The expense is currently a bit high, but we've got two orders of magnitude of cost reduction on the horizon.
There'll be some challenges initially developing the technology, but you're dealing with metal deposits that are far purer than anything found on Earth outside a scrapyard - the biggest challenges are probably going to be adapting mining and refining technology to work in space. And probably basic industrial technology as well as mining operations are scaled up beyond proof of concept - fortunately iron-casting is simple technology with very low requirements (sand, a binding agent for it, and a heat source that could easily be provided by a large parabolic reflector and/or fresnel lens array), and we even have prototype 3D iron printers already, (sand too) so it shouldn't be hard to start putting the waste-heap to work.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday December 09 2019, @10:56AM
SpaceX is on track to start launching customer (telecom) payloads using Starship around 2021-2022, not 2040.
The fuel doesn't matter that much (hydrogen was considered early on). Some advantages of methane are that you can manufacture it on Mars and it burns more cleanly than kerosene, allowing easier reuse of the system without refurbishment.
What does matter is full reusability and in-orbit refueling. Not throwing away part of your rocket every launch saves millions. In-orbit refueling allows you to get a full 100+ tons almost anywhere in the solar system instead of 5-10 tons, and cut trip time to places like Mars.
The choice of steel instead of carbon fiber also reduces costs since it is not ablative and can be reused more. It's cheaper, easier to work with (allowing SpaceX to build outside), and could be repaired or disassembled by astronauts.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 09 2019, @07:30AM (4 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday December 09 2019, @09:04AM (2 children)
Starship+Superheavy is supposed to *initially* haul 220,000lbs to LEO, with an estimated $1M in fuel, and $2M total launch costs with target reusability. One of the benefits of using natural gas rather than RP-1(ultra-refined kerosene), is that you don't need the expensive heavy refinement - relatively pure methane is cheap, and it's easy to make it much purer if needed.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 09 2019, @02:50PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 09 2019, @03:43PM
Yeah, we'll see about the rest of the launch costs, but the cost of fuel is probably a pretty safe bet. And given SpaceX's track record thus far it's probably a question of when, not if, the other costs can be brought down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday December 09 2019, @11:21AM
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-flight-passenger-cost-elon-musk.html [space.com]
$2 million launch cost
$900,000 of that cost is propellant
100,000 kilograms launched at minimum to LEO, 150,000 kilograms has been the target
So the cost can be closer to $6/lb.
SpaceX may decide to get into terrestrial manufacturing of liquid methane and oxygen to lower its fuel costs. If they do manage to make it on-site, then they don't need to have it trucked in from somewhere else (a potential hazard [wcvb.com]). The factory could be powered by Tesla solar equipment. This does not necessarily make economic sense anytime soon, but it's a potential path to a $1.5 million or lower launch cost.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]