What would be the IRL backlash against a private corporation choosing to tow an asteroid into orbit to mine it for...

Relatively long term mission endurance is the name of the game for asteroid mining. If this was to be more than a one time thing (mining fissile material for rtgs) it would have to be utilized in situ. This would just be a drain on money unless the goal was long term exploitation of space.

>gold
There are far more valuable metals in asteroids.

Gold's value is mostly in the fact that humans find it pretty.
Platinum, Rhenium, etc on the other hand have more industrial and hyperalloy uses.

Neodymium, holy shit do we need that. That shit's in fucking every electronic. Also Iridium is far more plentiful in space than planetside.

If they put it in geosync then every nation (and communication company) in the world is going to throw a bitchfit almost as large as OP's mum. That particular orbit is hella expensive, for obvious reasons.

The issue is, it's not like people aren't going to notice the tools going into space before it happens.

This sort of thing is something that would probably only happen with global involvement and approval.

I'm well aware of that, but gold currently has a higher price per kg than platinum and Rhenium right now:

jmbullion.com/charts/platinum-price/
jmbullion.com/charts/gold-price/
smhpa.com/rhenium-growth-forecast-boeing-forecast-4-5-trillion-market-for-34000-new-planes/

If it were possible to farm Californium then I would be talking about that as its price per kg is far more than all three of these materials combined. Diamond goes over gold in price per kg, but that's due to politics more than anything else so mining it would do fuck all if the diamond suppliers could just flood the market with cheaper diamonds to destroy your business.

not for lack of trying though, they are almost to Best Korea levels of effectiveness

youtube.com/watch?v=rpKCX3c-y4o

Or not and it would be a statement piece for one state or another

What's the value of iridium per kilo? Palladium? Rhodium? There are plenty of scarce materials you could destroy the market of while still profiting wildly if you're harvesting asteroids.

>Mars slingshot
Due to Mars's trip time and delta v required it would be easier to save on reaction mass and perform a slingshot of Earth to Venus to reach the asteroid belt/outer solar system instead of Earth to Mars. Mars would only prove useful if you were launching from Mars itself.

>Mars mining base
Mars suffers from a lack of power coming to it what with its near vacuum atmosphere and lack of sunlight, and its mass is large enough that the rocket equation would matter for launches. Its moons would be more useful for pure mining purposes as you don't need too much delta v to escape those.

>Ceres
Trip times alone would make robotic based exploration/mining the only possibility for mining in the near future until somebody gets the political power to be allowed use of a nuclear rocket.

Palladium: $23,695.08
[apmex.com/spotprices/palladium-price]

Iridium: $24595.2855
[quandl.com/collections/markets/rare-metals]

With the previous chart for the Iridium price Rhodium can beat gold sometimes, but it's also extremely volatile which would make mining it a questionable investment.

A lot of impotent butthurt about space being noncommercial/belonging to no one.

Maybe some laws getting passed to deal with it.

Honestly though, towing an asteroid to earth wouldn't be the way one would go about mining an asteroid for anything but proof of concept, hell mining asteroids for earth resources doesn't even make all that much sense. Though it would make sense for doing in-space construction because of the fuckhuge costs of getting anything out of the gravity well.

The asteroid could fuck up every other satellite in orbit, possibly including the moon if it was fuckoff huge enough. It could potentially disrupt the orbit of GPS networks, communications satellites, etc, and depending on what it's made of, could interfere with said satellites' communications between one another.

There's of course also the risk of a botched mission and the asteroid's orbit gets fucked and it de-orbits.

Then there are political repercussions. Who decides who owns what asteroid? Can anybody fly up there and mine? Do you need to claim an asteroid first in order to mine it? What if a company just up and claims every asteroid, leaving every other potential competitor holding their dicks? How would a dispute over the asteroid be handled - is it a civil matter against private corporations, or is it a geopolitical/territorial dispute?

Ripping a lot of stuff off from Planetes here, but you might see people upset over the progress of the first world and its monopoly over space, while the poorer nations are left on Earth to rot.

Isn't an asteroid in earth orbit+ the tech to move it there a massive security risk?
You could easily have some government freak out about the idea of a corp dropping rocks on their head.

There is also the very real threat that mining debris would pose for other spacecraft and satellites. Mining is a dirty business and drilling or blasting would throw out tons of small bodies that would pollute many more orbits than just the one the asteroid operation was in.

Even if your mining operation got permission from your home government, expect other space faring governments to be hugely upset by your plans, maybe even to the point where they would attempt to stop you by force.

>terrorist can jack the asteroid and make it drop on planet it's orbiting it
If they were a religious group, it might serve their goals more to blow the asteroid up in orbit. There by trapping humanity on Earth where god intended us to be.
youtube.com/watch?v=xgGm5odlIh4

>What if a company just up and claims every asteroid, leaving every other potential competitor holding their dicks? How would a dispute over the asteroid be handled

Then you get space mercs enforcing claims and staking territory where no goverment has any power or jurisdiction

And now you have a setting.

The real value of astroid mining in orbit is putting raw materials into orbit without lifting them off the ground.

>I doubt either of these would actually be legitimate sources of backlash.
You'd be wrong.

That is a very legitimate source of outrage over the wild government spending at the time. Unless the company relies on tax breaks and smaller contracts to get is capital to launch rockets from this would be 100% private industry, and private money, we're talking about which means taxpayers won't have to pay dick and still get to see cool rockets launch.

Previous accident that caused massive death and destruction and fucked the weather?

>legitimate sources of backlash.

Actually, the first post you quoted there has some points, sarcasm aside. Space junk and satellite damage suits are a possible near-future negligence issue. Also, there are currently binding international treaties that preserve certain celestial bodies (e.g. the moon) as the common property of all mankind, because space law has its roots in environmental and international law. Some nations are considering the implications of commercial mining of non-covered bodies, though. U.S.C. Title 51 is current US space law, including a provision guaranteeing ownership of the resources found in any asteroid or other celestial body to whoever manages to harvest it, as long as they're compliant with other laws and treaties.

Space junk is only an issue if it's near an important orbit, I doubt this asteroid tug would place it any where near GEO. The asteroid would very likely be near Earth's escape orbit, which I doubt anyone would care about.

Microsatellites are all the rage these days, chucking as many tiny objects into very crowded orbits. If you wanted something to get mad out, companies that want to focus on microsatellites like New Zealand's Rocket Lab would be the ones to get mad at.

youtube.com/watch?v=LwBLE0Nbnao

Economic Instability caused by new resource surplus would be one. International Conflicts could be another - China rolls up to the 'roid, informs the company they're taking the resources because space is nobody's sovereign soil.

You'd also have your apocalyptic loons on the surface (Asteroids cause Autism!), and depending on the company there may be other reactions - Maybe terrestrial Union Miners are being put out of work, or the company's engaging in the time-honoured tradition of strong-arming for poorer conditions and the like ("Let us pay our workers less, give us tax breaks, or we'll move ALL our mining to low orbit!"). Tax arguments could also be an issue - Maybe the company launches the craft from Lichtenstein, to avoid paying taxes, but other nations disagree; suddenly everyone's fighting over who gets to take the taxes home.

It's interesting you mention the economics of rocket industries boosting local economies and the politics around that because there used to be a private rocket company called OTRAG that had an incredibly promising low cost rocket that they were launching in equatorial Africa, but due to politics France and the USSR did not want a German company developing potential missiles in a region that was under a dictatorship that could also acquire the technology (Zaire).

Had OTRAG not shut down the local economy would likely have seen a massive benefit both on the part of the rocket scientists coming to the area to work and other governments/businesses paying for the ability to launch rockets at an extremely affordable price. The region housing the launch site would likely end up having its own civil war to liberate itself from the Zaire regime, but after that it could become a stable country that would potentially stabilize the regions around it as well.

Any launch site on an equatorial country is a mouthwatering prospect to a space company, so I think if we were to see the development of a new space economy the most likely countries to become new super powers in the near future wouldn't be out of Europe, they would probably be Singapore and Indonesia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batam#Economy

Batam already has manufacturing power behind it, building ships and electronics, and the advanced Singapore a short ferry ride away.

I suppose you could have some individuals arguing that the asteroids own gravitational pull could play havoc with the tides on Earth, also some would say that it is too dangerous to have it close to Earth because if its orbit starts deteriorating its gonna smash face first into Earth.

And then you got the economical and military reasons other anons have pulled up.

>China rolls up to the 'roid, informs the company they're taking the resources because space is nobody's sovereign soil.
And so the age of space piracy begins.

Why waste all that effort hauling it into earth orbit? Just mine it in it's current orbit, and circularise it's orbit with the stream of ores and ices hurled off it by mass accelerator.

Maybe they could park it in Earth orbit after hollowing it out, having used the interior of it as propellant (and caught it for sale to other colonies), and then proceed to spin it for internal gravity and conduct unethical experiments on their employees after moving them all there.

Religious nutjobs - Every asteroid sacred and shit like that...

To this day, there are people sueing NASA over moving an asteroid a tenth of a milimeter.
Apparently it screws up horoscopes, or something?

I doubt they'd directly do it. Given how corporations work they'd probably bribe some senators to have the government do it for them, or the corporations would do it with a government grant or whatever.

The real backlash over the increasing power of corporations would either be ignored or hijacked by lefties (corporations are too powerful! That's why we need our easily bribed government to have even more power!).

A better conflict would be a private corporation purchasing Mars, then slamming icy asteroids and stray comets into it to add water and mass.

> You're destroying the Martian ecology
All our evidence shows any martian life is long dead.
> Debris!
Mars has a gravity field
> It's a nature preserve!
We own it.

Fun thing is; they don't have to buy it.

Laws are only as powerful as those who enforce them, if you flew out to Mars today and said "I own this planet" nobody would be able to stop you.

If a Corp was the only group that could reach Mars they'd be able to do whatever the fuck they wanted.

Why are people still concerned about Delta v?

The emdrive will set us free.

I love how rockets are just sustained, directed explosions.

I especially love how some madman thought up the NSW rocket, a sustained, directed nuclear explosion.

You can keep your low emissions EM drive. I want something with more horsepower.

>Need to build a 20km wide ship to get to alpha centauri in 1330 years
>Need to consume 30,000,000 bombs to do it

Nope.

There'd probably be some UN law against placing stellar objects of that size close to earth for safety reasons.

The corp would just need to bite the bullet and cargo haul from wherever the asteroid was

>falling for the EM drive meme

i imagine the enviromentalist would lose their shit if it in any way changed the gravitational force on tides. especially if the only negative drawback was that some small useless form of krill died because of it

>getting cucked by Big Solid Fuel

All krill feeds the ocean, the ocean feeds the world.

>"A global devil-worshipping Einsteinist conspiracy is trying to keep free energy a secret!"

Next you'll claim you're posting from a computer powered by a perpetual motion machine

EM drives have nothing to do with free energy.

it's conversion of electricity into thrust in a vacuum.

>"some small useless form"
>THIS ONE SPECIES IS VITAL HURR DEE DURRR

Don't be a retard user, there is no single species the world would be fucked without. Even if it's a shit tier shrimp.

It doesn't convert electricity into thrust. It doesn't work. It's magic. The experiments and (lack of) physics behind them were always wonky. Two of the three independent teams that initially supported the drive have recanted after they performed better tests, and the third one says they can't rule out experimental error.

>there is no single species the world would be fucked without.

Hard to say. It might be extremely hard to get the consent from THE WHOLE WORLD to do this, but there's no laws governing outer space, so it's not like they could legally stop you.

Once the asteroid starts producing the goods, the economic boost might also make everyone shut up.

The biggest problem might actually be environmentalists upset about all the rocket traffic.

>A conspiracy theory begins that the towed near-earth asteroid is somehow dangerous
>different permutations of it are various degrees on the wack to nearly responsible and rational fears
>the conspiracy theory is bought by some mid-level politician. Someone from the party you don't like
>they singlehandedly distort public discourse about the benefits or necessity or viability of the mining operation
SIMULTANEOUSLY
>elon musk and peter thiel are both doing the same shit
>corporate espionage
>patent law violations
SIMULTANEOUSLY
>insurance companies hike their prices for the patently absurd possibility of asteroid damage
>the futures money generated by the potential of that much untapped wealth makes a few people very rich
>but bankrupt some traditional mining concerns
SIMULTANEOUSLY
>'ecologically concerned' citizens protest or cause trouble because of increased rocket launches being an environmental hazard
SIMULTANEOUSLY
>india or someone raises a huge international fuss about corporate abuse of space
>coalition of 'developing' economies engender a geopolitical situation where tensions between those who have access to space mining and those who do not becomes serious
>proxy wars
>less trust in the west ensures that antagonistic leaders are elected in India, Thailand, Russia, Japan etc
>widening inequality, increase of economic migration cause crises worldwide

>the rich get rich
>the poor get broke
>owe your soul to the company store

Man, 16 tons is a great song

>humon

Animals adapt to changes in their environment. Of course, there will be losses, but give it around five million years and the biodiversity will recover. The problem with species going extinct now is that with the many complicated ways in which each species reacts with its environment, there is no way of being certain in telling which creatures are important enough to cause a chain reaction that backfires on human society or economy.
tl;dr Letting species go extinct is like pushing buttons at random without knowing what they do.

Is the joke that her kids wouldn't be so hungry if she hadn't eaten all the food?

Yeah but that would fuck the setting a bit, unless you want your martian overlords to be a distant and nebulous thing. A distant and unfriendly master you cannot flee to if things go south here on earth. Where presumably most of the powers-that-be would take issue with you for being the hands of mars.

What you'd want is a brief loophole this corporation exploited. Perhaps they made a more space-viable breakthrough and instead of patenting it or something they instead demanded the rights to mars and promptly fucked off

NASA recently published a peer reviewed paper on it, which justifies further testing in space.

It is also consistent with non mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics. Which would mean not completely reworking physics, but tidying up a bit.

It still means nothing. We already have methods of propulsion that don't require reaction mass. Look up tether propulsion and solar sails. Both of those are on the same level of "thrust" that even the best case scenario an em drive could produce.

>Tether
Not viable for interstellar.
>Solar sails
Somewhat more viable for interstellar, but you're objectively ignorant of the current facts surrounding both em drives and solar sails of you think summary sails are as efficient as em drives potentially could be. Solar sails are two orders of magnitude less efficient than the em drive tested in the NASA paper.

Read more.

Efficiency for electric propulsion often =/= thrust to mass ratio, it's often seen for electrical power conversion to specific impulse[1]. The EMdrive caps out at solar sail levels of low thrust and given its supposed method of changing delta v it likely will stay that way indefinitely.

Maybe you should be the one that reads more instead of just jumping on the bandwagon of pop science bloggers that no nothing about the subject matter they report on.

[1] descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/SciTechBook/series1/Goebel__cmprsd_opt.pdf page 27

Of course efficiency for electric propulsion doesn't equal thrust to mass ratio. That's retarded, and the fact that you even thought that was the discussion says a lot about you.

Efficiency here means thrust per watt. The em drives are two orders more efficient than solar sails at this, meaning construction wise you can slap a nuclear reactor on the space ship and reliably get 1g acceleration for an entire hypothetical trip. This cuts the travel for a manned craft down from hundreds or even thousands of years, to five or six years to get to alpha centauri.

It's worth noting that the fastest proposed trip to ac using light sails is a 20 year unmanned nano computer accelerated by a laser array on earth.

>efficiency means thrust per watt
No. Efficiency in electric propulsion is the measure of how much is lost in the conversion of wattage to acceleration, it's not a direct thrust per watt.

In addition, the concept you are talking about is thrust, and the gap between low and high thrust propulsion systems still exists with the EM drive as the EM drive offers an even lower thrust than conventional electric systems. Thrust, and scalability, is completely different from efficiency.

The notion that an EM drive, or even dozens to hundreds of EM drives, could even generate 1 full g of acceleration is so absurd that every single word out of your mouth only demonstrates your own stupidity further.

And before you talk about the benefits of an "endless burn" also know that THAT IS WHAT EVERY SINGLE OTHER ELECTRIC DRIVE ALREADY DOES.

Just stop talking, you have no idea what you're saying.

Name one single electric drive that doesn't require massive amounts of propellant, or is incredibly inefficient in the gaps between stars.

You can't.

Nigga we aren't going to the next star with in either of our life times, the wildly impractical idea of interstellar travel was never part of the argument, why the fuck are you resorting to this.

Because the reason people are excited about the em drive is it does enable interstellar travel in our life time if it works. Again, read.

No it doesn't. I'm done trying to argue with an idiot.

You aren't really arguing, just sticking your fingers in your ears saying "nya nya nya"

>not using based nuclear pulse propulsion

Don't be a pussy, user.

Nothing in nature is useless, you moron.

The White et al. paper in AIAAJ?
arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120
It's the same old poor quality work that you've come to expect from these folks.

First, it's only a "NASA paper" in that it was studied in the Eagleworks, which does fringe experiments (like ones related to the Alcubierre drive, which is just as unlikely to work) with a shoestring budget for aerospace companies, NASA and DARPA. The official position of the NASA press corps is that they don't think it works, but it would be a shame not to try as it's very cheap and science is best served by as many teams as possible working independently on a problem. The two other EM drive teams in China and Germany have already admitted their results were indistinguishable from experimental error.

The 2016 paper itself is shoddy and doesn't account for many sources of error. That it was published in an engineering journal instead of a physics journals, the latter of which usually scrutinize the math and methodology more carefully, should be a clear red flag. For example, if you've been following the EM drive saga you've probably noticed how in most of these studies with positive results, the thrust doesn't actually stop after electricity is turned off and the microwave radiation dissipates, but instead decays over time just like if it was caused by a hot object cooling down. The new paper has the same problem, showing the same thermal effect, and doesn't do nearly enough to separate a supposed thrust effect from it.

And Harold White's virtual particle explanation is so poorly constructed and riddled with basic errors that most EM drive proponents with decent enough understanding of physics appear to ignore it, and prefer things like McCulloch's Unruh radiation hypothesis, or modified gravity theories. There's also that one funny crackpot idea about dark matter being the cause (the few eccentrics that support that last one are usually the ones shouting that dark matter is a conspiracy).

>if you flew out to Mars today and said "I own this planet" nobody would be able to stop you.

There's actually an international treaty forbidding people from doing that. All that 'buy a piece of the moon' crap? Actually selling land rights on the moon was more illegal than ripping people off by pretending to.

What EM drive?

Nuclear thermal rockets are the order of the day when you're moving a lot of ship. Overbuild the drive so you can do high-thrust burns when needed, or just run it throttled down and using the excess heat to power high-energy systems like an on-board cinema.
Fuel tank? You mean a swimming pool, right? Fuel is carried as liquid water, and can be pumped around for trimming the ship's mass distribution. It's cracked into hydrogen and oxygen before use, and the hydrogen is heated through the reactor and thrown out the back of the ship for thrust. The oxygen is breathed by the crew, and thrown into the exhaust plume and ignited to provide and afterburner for really high-thrust events, like taking off from Earth or landing on Mars to start mining it.

>Nuclear thermal rockets
I'm in the "EM drive is a hoax" camp, but how practical is that really?
Nuclear payloads decay over time. You can't really do anything ultra long-term.

>international treaty
And whose space armada is gonna enforce it.

The beauty of it is that not only do you have a half-life measured in decades for that nuclear core, you don't NEED more than decades to get there.
NTRs are incredible. High thrust and high efficiency, compared to chemical rockets. The only problem is the first letter. 'Nuclear'. You say the N-word, and people get nervous. They think of chernobyl, of 3-mile island (which was a case of the containment building working exactly as designed and containing shit), or Fukushima, and of nuclear tests and 'what happens if it explodes on launch', because chemical rockets do that.

UN treaty, so the space armada of whatever countries they can coerce into taking action.
Or they'll freeze your terrestrial assets. Good thing you're paying your Mars-based employees in company scrip redeemable for company-grown food, really.
Which is also illegal.

How BIG is the asteroid we're talking about here?

It's gotta be at LEAST ISS sized, anything less would be an extreme waste of effort. But compared to the Moon, how big is it? 1/100th of the Moon? 1/10th? Even 1/4th?

The size really changes things.

>You say the N-word, and people get nervous.
Nah, I'm all for nuclear. Great energy density, minimal environmental impact relative to energy production.
But wouldn't things like be unfeasible?

>ISS sized
Hey, speaking of the ISS... why is it in the atmosphere? To dodge space debris, or what exactly?

>Nigga we aren't going to the next star with in either of our life times
Well, not in the flesh. A quantum communications probe strapped to a nuclear drive could be relaying information back to Earth, about Alpha Centauri, in half a lifetime. Now whether any nation has the will or the desire to empty their pockets on something like that is another thing altogether.

That's nuclear pulse propulsion. Literally throwing nukes out the back of the ship and setting them off to ride the shockwave.

A Nuclear Thermal Rocket is where you run a propellant through the core of a reactor so it heats up and expands, and squirt said expanding fluid out the back of the ship for thrust. Lower thrust than BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM but much higher efficiency. Project Orion was conceived as part of a project for finding 'peaceful uses' for nuclear weapons. The idea was pitched to the people who invented the nuke in the 1960s. They laughed. Then they realised it wasn't a joke.
So, out came the ideas. 'Use the shockwave to propel something into the sky', 'set off a bunch to carve a harbour out of solid rock', 'use them to dig holes', and 'use the edge of a crater to divert a river'.
The spacecraft idea worked when they tested it with a small model and sheets of plastic explosive.
The harbour was deemed 'impractical', because you'd have to put the harbour in the middle of fucking nowhere to avoid nuking anywhere useful. And then you'd have a harbour nobody wanted to use, and that nobody COULD use because it was surrounded by nuclear fallout and still fucking glowing.
Digging holes was declared 'impractical' because it's really hard to predict what a nuke will do underground.
Diverting rivers was deemed 'possible, but stupid'. It worked, kind of, but it was expensive compared to just using digging equipment. And left fallout everywhere.

The maths were done on the spacecraft idea. Turns out, that with 1960s tech, you could blast a goddamn city's worth of mass into a solar orbit with high-yield nukes.
The downside is that you'd have to really, really want to, because you'd be nuking the launch site repeatedly, and then setting off blasts all the way through the atmosphere on the way out. And would kill ten people instantly through cancer, and thousands/millions more with slower cancers.
As soon as the UN heard of it, they put a specific ban on it.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
Check that out. It explains a bunch of stuff about nuclear rockets and other kinds of rockets, and how to make space settngs plausible.