https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/space-is-starting-to-look-like-the-better-mining-operation/
Mining in space might be less environmentally harmful than mining asteroids on Earth.
I'm so intrigued by the prospect of mining asteroids! The amounts of metals and other resources, including rarer things like platinum family metals is incredible. There are some serious challenges that would need to be overcome, but the first country or company which pulls it off would open the doors to a future where we don't need to rip up earth to obtain all the rare stuff we need for high tech industry. And with huge amounts of asteroids being in the belts in our solar system, a practically inexhaustible supply too.
It is exciting but what’s the market? It’s hard to see this being at all a reasonable cost having to bring it back to Earth, especially unrefined, and it’s hard to imagine it not being worse than current mining, given the flight back to Earth, especially if refining is still on Earth
On the other hand I’m more excited over mining regolith and water. Such simple things, but will be a huge difference in cost to maintain any off-world presence. Shelter, radiation control, rocket fuel, drinking and bathing, growing food : water and dirt are pretty basic, but just think of the sheer tonnage of supply missions launching from Earth it could replace
I think the real value is amount of rare metals that could be harvested, scientists have found an asteroid that is comprised mostly of metals. Scientists think it may be the exposed core of a proto planet:
Metal asteroid Psyche has a ridiculously high 'value.' But what does that even mean?
So that kind of haul could potentially be worth it, but smelting, refinement and processing would probably be more cost effective in space. Who knows what the future will bring, mining the asteroid belt may only make sense once we have a much strong presence in space, I.E., colonies on Mars, the Moon, etc etc.
This is a lot of exciting words to say "instead of digging up the effectively limitless amount of rock under our feet we can go into space to do it in the least efficient and most expensive way"
It's very cool, but I would rather we spend our time and resources on more pressing things, given we have the rocks right here.
I would agree if mining the rocks on earth didn’t cause ecological collapses and kill off animals and displace indigenous and exploit underprivileged ethnic classes in post colonial hellholes
I’m sure mining in space will have its own problems but at least it can’t kill our biosphere
There’s been studies that have found metal particles in the atmosphere, so anything entering and exiting are seemingly shedding particles.
So it’s likely to cause issues down the road unfortunately.
I'll take the issue down the road over the one already in my doorstep any time of the week.
Atmospheric pollution is at least something that seems fixable with extraterrestrial resources. Ruined biospheres due to mining on earth seems less avoidable/fixable unless we go back to pre-industrial living standards.
How would it be fixable? The more stuff entering and exiting the atmosphere, the more particles. The particles aren’t from manufacturing on earth from what I read.
Particles we can bind with chemical reactions (like ad-blu for diesel engines), would be expensive and we would need to be careful to select chemical reactions that actually solve the problem but fundamentally it's a fixable problem.
How. Ruined biosphere from mining affects many discrete places that can be cleaned up, in theory. Messing up the atmosphere affects all biospheres, is much more vast, and we have to breathe in the meantime
Look at current mining - true crimes against the environment in specific places but do not directly impact most humans. Could you say that about messing up the atmosphere?
Isn't one of the current hot topics among environmentalists carbon capture, which is "cleaning up" the atmosphere as a whole?
the asteroid belt is like a protective barrier. if earth’s orbit was on a flat surface the belt would be on it too. this imaginary plane is where earth is most likely to collide with extraterrestrial objects. so if it was possible to reduce the asteroid belt to half its current mass, earth would technically be more vulnerable to collisions along our orbital path. it’s not the biggest threat but i felt the need to explain that.
Rocks ≠ ore. There are numerous materials (e.g. lithium) for the total known deposits on Earth won't cover more than a few decades' worth of projected demand, and even then, the mining process is an environmental disaster. Asteroid mining is a long-term project that will require huge advances in multiple fields, but it addresses a real need.
known deposits. There's functionally endless amounts of all elements we need on earth. And there is zero need to go mine asteroids at a truely astronomical cost of efficiency.
I said mostly the same thing as you in (my own words) elsewhere inside this post. Most people don't want to see this reality.
So, maybe this is a business opportunity : to attract investment and then face investors with hard facts. Of course we write the contract so that, after this, we just keep their stupid money.
Edit : Oops ! I just read your other comment :
you’ll also see (...) investment scams
And so I realize you were thinking along these lines already. (although my statement was much more cynical)
If it's truly the "least efficient and most expensive way" of mining then you have no reason to be the slightest bit worried, it won't get done in that case. Obviously.
This is true, but you'll also see a lot of investment scams by internet famous people, like funding a space company on the lies of Mars colonies
What, you think one can just snap their fingers and be done with a project like that? Its something thats never been done before. No need to be so disingenuous.
SpaceX is a private company, it's not taking investment from internet people.
Furthermore, its Mars goals are IMO the least revolutionary part of what the Starship program is working toward.
Investment scams from internet people. And I said scam like promising Mars colonization. I did not use the term revolutionary. Scam.
I can imagine a sort of a conveyor belt made of miniature cargo vessel with one robotized mining station at one end, cutting away an asteroid piece by piece, and a cargo dock at the Earth side.
With enough cargo vessels deployed, let's say one would arrive at each end everyother day, the moment the conveyor belt was full, the mining operation would be swift.
Assuming a global deal between nations could be struck to have a refinery or at least a cargo dock placed on the moon, to organize large cargos to come to Earth at programmed intervals, it could prove to be a very interesting endeavour.
Raw matterials price could drop, given the sheer available volume.
At least it sounds like a diferent sci-fi plot
Launch costs are coming way down. Once we get enough people into space to get industry going this will be great. Give adventureous people something to do and not destroy our planet. Asteriods are airless lumps of rock and metal just hanging around.
Give adventureous people something to do and not destroy our planet
Space Mining, Deep Rock Galactic style
We launch a few rockets to bring starter ewuipment and from then on everything gets mined from NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids) or the moon. Then no more rocket launches needed except to refresh crew as we already do with ISS.
I sure hope we find a way to do this and spread the increase in wealth and prosperity mostly equally amongst all people.
I would hate it if one guy got super powerful and filthy rich off this and then monopolized the asteroid mining industry.
If the movie Armageddon taught us anything it’s that it’ll be super easy to train miners for space.
Harry Stamper never never misses a depth that he aims for.
Also love how this movie stuck up for Mom and pop oil companies
Can we just get on with engineering a space elevator already? We're going to want one if we're serious about exploiting resources off planet.
You might as well ask: "Can we just get on with engineering an FTL drive?" as it is about as far beyond our capabilities as a space elevator is.
It really isn't. We know it's possible, we roughly know how to build one, it's only our material science that isn't there yet. But there are promising leads in that direction and with the right investments that problem looks solvable.
https://youtu.be/lldv_u4R6BU?si=65llxa5uHygOlT3K
With FTL our current science is saying that it's probably impossible and will never happen. We might be wrong about that, but if we are it's not going to be cracked anytime soon.
Yes, we have the theory of what is required to build one but every material we have (including graphene and carbon nanotubes) is about 2-3 orders of magnitude below the tensile strength that is required for a space elevator on earth. Add in the fact that the longest graphene and carbon nanotube we can currently produce is in the mm range and we need it to be ~50,000 km and perfect at the atomic level we would be at best decades away from production if they could be used.
Ironically the best place for us to begin is in space.
Building space elevator on the moon is much, much easier (1/6 G and no atmosphere) and Mars is also a much easier proposition than on earth (1/3 G and 1/1000th the atmospheric pressure).
I fully expect that if humans ever build space elevators the first one will not be on earth.
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I also am under the assumption that no material exists that could be stacked tall enough to build a space elevator.
You'd want tensile strength rather than compressive. The trick is to anchor a counterweight out beyond your target distance and let it pull the weight of the cable up rather than building a tower. Think of swinging a ball on a string rather than building a skyscraper. Assuming a sufficiently sized counterweight you can support the weight of the anchoring cable plus whatever else you want to hang off of it (space dock, elevator terminus, etc.)
stacked tall enough...? The space elevator concept is a geostationary node orbiting earth directly above a fixed point, with cables running between them. Not a gigantic skyscraper up into the sky. What am I missing?
You probably haven't read 3001: the final odissey, in any case i think most ideas of space elevators are not like a lift, they are more like skyscrapers indeed.
Edit: i might be very wrong though, i'm not up to date on this
If you build it tall enough, centrifugal force will start pulling on it. Building it that way though... But yeah. Doubt the right material exist atm.
I don't know why we have not been working out the kinks on the moon given how achievable its been for that for years.
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My guess is that we won't be doing any digging on asteroids at first. We will send a Spaceship (with 100tn of cargo capacity) and grab a whole small asteroid. Then the spaceship with the small asteroid Inside the cargo bay will return to earth. It sounds science fiction but don't forget we have already collected material from asteroids twice (the Japanese returned with 5gr and tre US 250gr).
You don't even have to go very far, there are hundreds of small asteroids between the moon and earth. I think we will be able to collect a whole small asteroid in 10 years max.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For instance, a study by Ian Lange of the Colorado School of Mines considers the potential—and challenges—for a fledgling industry that might reach a significant scale in the next several decades, driven by the demand for critical metals used in electronics, solar and wind power, and electric car components, particularly batteries.
While other companies are exploring the controversial idea of scooping cobalt, nickel, and platinum from the seafloor, some asteroids could harbor the same minerals in abundance—and have no wildlife that could be harmed during their extraction.
Lange’s study, coauthored with a researcher at the International Monetary Fund, models the growth of space mining relative to Earth mining, depending on trends in the clean energy transition, mineral prices, space launch prices, and how much capital investment and R&D grow.
By their assessment, metallic asteroids contain more than a thousand times as much nickel as the Earth’s crust, in terms of grams per metric ton.
Electric vehicles and their batteries need about six times the minerals conventional cars do, and they require both nickel and cobalt in significant quantities.
The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for 70 percent of cobalt production, for example, while nickel primarily comes from Indonesia and the Philippines, and Russia and South Africa have most of the global supply of platinum-group metals.
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Fantastic ! Well, in the next millenia we could see some real progress in this field (if we are lucky). So, lets look forward to the next million years with joy !
I don't think it will take a millenia. Rocket science is making good progress towards astroid stuff.
STOP MINING. STOP EXPANDING. STOP BEING OBSESSED WITH "GROWTH"
b-b-but 8 billion people isn't enough
YES IT IS
YEAH, AWESOME! We've totally fucked up our own planet with excessive and unrestricted mining operations, let's move on to others so a few people can get wealthy, and the masses can get their cheap shit from Amazon. Woohoo!
In all seriousness, what do you think is going to happen if we strip mine Asteroids? Unlike earth there is no life on Asteroids, there is nothing to destroy. Even the other planets are lifeless and sterile, holding back from mining them is just stupid. We are sitting on the only known rock in the solar system we can't indiscriminately strip mine, I say we switch our mining operations to one of the many rocks we can harvest without issues as soon as possible.
Where do you think all our current junk is going right now? We don't even have a handle on that at local levels, let alone globally. Bringing more junk to our planet isn't fixing shit for anyone except the wealthy people and corporations who want more money and can afford to mine asteroids.
What do you find it to be solving, exactly?
Ship goes down, brings ores. Ship goes up, takes trash with it. Two issues solved with one rocket.
I don't think you realize just how huge and dead space is. We can dump all the trash humanity will ever produce in space and it'd likely not even be noticeable for anyone looking in from the outside. There is no life we can potentially ruin by dumping trash in the asteroid belts, there is no environment that would be getting harmed. No water it can poison, no way to come back to us except by orbital intercept and we already have ways to avoid that as well.
Space is the ultimate solution to pretty much every single environmental problem. The only thing we need to pay attention to is what happens while we send stuff up and while it comes back down. Manufacturing, trash dumps, everything remotely environmentally harmful can just be relocated to space where it does 0 harm to anything.
Launching trash with rockets with our current primitive technology is pretty dangerous. If a rocket gets out of control while suborbital it's like tons of small meteors hitting us.
This is also why launching radioactive material into the sun is a bad idea. The way there is too dangerous.
We have to face the fact that we don't have sci Fi space ships.
Regardless, mining asteroids (and potentially other planets) would be an absolute win.
Launching anything into the sun is a very bad idea unless you very specifically need it to be in the sun, because it takes so much energy. It pretty much only makes sense to send probes and nothing else.
If I'm reading the delta-V map on Wikipedia correctly escaping the solar system is cheaper by about 97.7% than shooting something directly into the sun (18009 m/s vs 790371 m/s from launch). Reducing orbital energy is paradoxically really expensive...
Even just getting something to orbit the sun closer than mercury is more expensive than shooting it out of the solar system entirely.
So yeah looking at those numbers I think space mining is a lot more practicable than I though, delta-v from the moon to the kuiper belt (including capture burns in the kuiper belt around asteroids/planetoids) is cheaper than from the earth to the moon, only problem is travel time.
Definitely agree. My point isn't that it will immediately solve all problems but it will step by step. As you say sending up trash is a bad idea in the beginning but once we know rockets are reliable enough (I dunno, maybe one failure in 10000?) we can start sending up chemically safe trash (stuff that won't damage the composition of the atmosphere) or find ways to bind potentially harmful substances into harmless ones (like is done with most of the exhaust gas in a combustion engine)
We obviously won't have a 100% perfect solution immediately but it is long term leaps better than what we currently have.
Not to mention the particularly toxic stuff won't even be here on earth because we will likely refine the ores in space, leaving the toxic byproducts there in the first place.
Your logic is exactly what I'm pointing out though. "We don't have a solution yet" should never mean "just make things worse, and we'll figure it out eventually".
If you haven't been living on this planet long, this is how the people who own the resources you're being sold kick that can down the road, and make it your problem when these corporations polluting the shit out of everything are the problem. If everyone in the world picked up their garbage on a daily basis, it won't fix rocket fuel pollution, microplastics, radiation, water shortages, or carbon emissions. Only the fucked up factories creating all the bullshit people think they need to live reforming will do that. Giving them more resources to make more junk to polite our planet isn't going to do shit but make them more money.
Currently the best price to low Earth orbit is $1,500/kg. In Seattle (where I happen to live), they charge about $0.18/kg to send trash to a landfill from a waste transfer station, and I assume it's quite a bit cheaper in less crowded places. That's about a factor of 8200 difference, but it gets worse. For one thing you still need to get the trash to a spaceport, which could be thousands of miles away. For another, you can't use LEO for trash because it's way too crowded already. You'd need to put the trash in a much higher orbit, which of course costs quite a bit more money. And if you want to get it out of Earth orbit entirely, well...I don't even know where to look for a price for that, because it's just not normally done.
I really can't imagine a scenario in which launching trash into space is even close to cost effective compared to just burying it. You may say the cost of launching stuff into space will come down, but who's to say the cost of digging holes won't come down just as much?
I can pretty safely assume that the $0.18 figure does not include any measures to contain and reduce damage to the environment done by that trash. The entire point of dumping trash in space would not be that it's cheaper it's that it would be overall better. General rule from life experience is that cheaper usually isn't even close to acceptable in all other parameters.
But yes as things stand now sending trash up is not economical, however by moving industry to space a lot of the trash gets produced in space though so there would be less to shoot up in the first place. Particular heavy industry pollutes like crazy and would benefit from not having to worry about their toxic goop poisoning everything around it.
To add to that, if possible trash should always be recycled. Bio waste can do bio things (I'm not a biologist, idk), Minerals can be reused, and so on.
Person...you really need to read up on the weight ratios required to move junk into space. If that was at all economically, environmentally, or logistically possible to do so, don't you think someone would have done that by now? We still launch rockets with fossil fuels, friend. You need something closer to a 1:1 weight to fuel ratio even to start thinking about this being a wash, ignoring the cost of the rocket materials.
Sci-fi thinking is great. Get with the real world and educate yourself about the problem before you start thinking that way though. Attack the problem from an informed point of view, not from what you can imagine in a Gene Roddenberry world.
You do realize that space flight has been pretty much stagnant for the last few decades. Before SpaceX came in and started reusing boosters there was pretty much 0 innovation in propulsion tech. So just throwing in the towel from the get go is a bit silly.
Besides there are plans to move industry to space, it's the entire reason NASA is restarting their moon base ambitions. And news flash: moving heavy industry away from earth will already do more for the environment than any pollution reduction program ever could. Most of the toxic trash we are stuck with gets produced while turning the raw materials into something usable. The rest of the trash is comparably a drop in the ocean.
I'm not thinking too sci-fi here, this is all pretty reasonable to do given moderate advances in rocket tech (the only major problem I see is added green house gases from rocket fuel so that's something to look into I guess)
Asteroids are basically piles of rock, it's not like we're going to be destroying lush ecosystems.
Indeed. I sighed before I clicked on this post because I knew a comment exactly like this one was going to be a the top.
Or just obvious sarcasm to bring to light how people are looking to bring MORE junk back to our planet instead of cleaning it up first.
Why are you wasting time and emitting carbon dioxide by using a computer to converse on the Fediverse when you could be out picking up trash from gutters right now?
Yay! Let’s continue our fucking up of everything into the solar system!
We did it, boys!!
I mean. If the planet or asteroid isn’t habitable and has no ecosystem to speak of, then we aren’t really fucking anything up.
It’s just a new frontier playground for billionaires after they fuck everything up here. It won’t be used for anything worthwhile, like actual science or whatever.