How do you think Space Mining is going to start...

Bigelow habitats placed in orbit
Strap engine to it, fuel it, send a dozen people on a the redirect mission

You'd want to be bringing the asteroids back to earth using their own volatiles

Yeah! Let's send asteroids towards Earth! What could go wrong?

>When we get to that level of automation and resource abundance, prices won't matter. It will be a socialist utopia
this desu

Just like breeding better horses cheaply made more sense than developing infrastructure to facilitate industrialisation?

fucking brainlets, when will they learn?

We can't cold fuse hydrogen but you want to cold fuse platinum?

Fucking kill yourself moron

?
could move the asteroid into a very large orbit around earth is LEO is considered "risky"

no more a pipe dream than what you're spewing

The only reason asteroid mining or serious prospecting has not been done is because launch costs have been outrageous for the last few decades

Now they are dropping dramatically, so we'll be seeing private missions to nearby NEA soon

brainlet detected

don't respond to the brainlet, he seems to think building our own O class star to harvest precious metals is more feasible than autonomous mining on asteroids

>tfw even Veeky Forums has fallen for the Veeky Forumscism meme

>autonomous
kek

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car

keep up with the times brainlet

Everyone will say it is impossible/impractical/not worth it.

Then someone will do it.

Then everyone will say they always knew it was a good idea.

>wouldnt the excavation of an asteroid made up entirely of precious metals going to devalue the ones we have back at home?

Nobody gives a crap whether releasing goods into a market devalues them if they can profit off it. The real problem though is that the costs of operation would most likely hugely outweigh any possible profits. After all, it's not sending some little capsule with a dish on a one-way trip so it can send back data via radio.

>tfw getting a PhD in inorganic chemistry
>tfw space mining

I just want to play SpaceChem in real life without dying or having my crew go crazy.

>elements and metals

The chance of finding any stable isotopes (let alone, any appreciable amounts of them) of elements heavier than anything that was either found in the Earth's crust or has been synthetitisised in labs is probably negligibly small.

>We are already capable of manufacturing elements
How many synthetic elements have been found even remotely useful (besides plutonium if you want to nuke someone, but even then it's not useful by itself but only by fission into something lighter)? Heck, how many of them have even halfway stable isotopes?

Only true in our solar system

mining operations on earth aren't cheap m8
Especially in developed countries
Another big thing is being able to produce fuel to refuel rockets in LEO
That'll be worth billions

If you are American and the orbitology is handled by Iranians, I'd say yes.

Remember that this can be a way for the USA to utterly tank the Chinese dominance in rare earth metals and secure self reliance basically forever. Such concerns have permitted many odd moves earlier. The US drive to grow pistachios was a move to strangle Iranian dominance in the market. It worked. While destroying Californian water resources.

You believe other star systems have different physics? Or do you think that some superheavy elements with stable isotopes exist which somehow were created in a hypernova somewhere?

433 Eros has $492,187,500,000,000,000 worth of platinum m8

>make it sound like its a technological limitation

the amount of energy output from fusion is less than what it takes to initiate fusion with elements higher than iron (FE #26) on the periodic table, cold or hot.

platinum, being Pt(#78), will NEVER, EVER be used for fusion, far too heavy, besides, Pt is far more useful for its catalytic properties.

>catalyst
>one material initiates reaction in another(or molecule), while not being consumed itself

>post scarcity

Will never exist.

I was responding to a brainlet who thought it would be a better way to acquire platinum than space mining

The 2nd one obviously. No reason it can't be true

Oh shut up, youre talking out of your ass. We can synthesize 3 atoms of elenent 116, how is that a,better alternative to mining the damm element from an asteroid?

Pretty fucking sure as technology improves, asteroid,mining will be a muchore attractive alternative,to obtain resources than smashing a bunch of atoms

>devalue the ones we have back at home?
that's inevitable, if people can find a faster and cheaper way to mine higher quantities of certain metals from outer speace, there's no purpose in continuing mining on earth with classic methods.

qntm.org/asteroids

>he thinks we would mine space for fuel
If even Veeky Forums is this retarded I'm not sure there's a future for the human race.

>some dumbass liberal blathering about how scared he is of reality
why would you post this

lol I see how talking about how much the war in iraq cost, and how we should spend that money on converting the US to a "hydrogen economy", whatever that means

How about we cut socialist spending which is an order of magnitude more? dumbassliberal

The first people to do it would end up being obscenely rich before the market adjusted, so I don't see how that would be a problem.

>How do you think Space Mining is going to start?
With preliminary ISRU experiments as a side-task to some (likely government-funded) exploration mission.
Then, if that's successful, there will probably be attempts to use mined materials to support settlements/habitats on extraterrestrial bodies.

You probably won't ever see materials brought back to Earth for economic profit. Spaceflight is simply too energy-intensive.

>You probably won't ever see materials brought back to Earth for economic profit. Spaceflight is simply too energy-intensive.
Thats part of advancing a civilization, is using more energy
Really it doesn't seem difficult at all, we've already sent unmanned probes to these places, sending a bigger manned/unmanned craft to actually mine is just a larger scale.

only when space industries and consumer are established.

Im working on a space mining start up company.

looking for investors.

We just need one of them there tesla heavy one punch rockets.

and we are in biz.

[email protected]

feel free to send your bank account and peronsal info. to resive and investment invoice and your shares.

Invest in the future. invest in space mining

No matter how "advanced" you get, it will still always be less energy/cost-intensive to mine/recover/recycle/reprocess the matter we already have here on Earth than to go fetch it from elsewhere to bring back.

First we need cheap and very mass-energy efficient rockets.
If we find some very energy-dense batteries(portable nuclear reactor?) and find way to use something like EMdrive as main engine, every larger country will mine asteroids like crazy.
With material from asteroids and this advanced technology, we will be able to build real space ships, colonize other planets etc.

>SpaceChem in real life
That's living the dream.

wtf. it is scarcity that will drive this you twat.

Platinum group metals are of profound importance in catalysis and energy production/storage, but they are far too scarce on earth to be used on a global scale. This need drives the cost up which will be the incentive for asteroid mining within the next 100 years, probably 50 honestly.

seems legit.

What if space travel became more efficient than digging? Then what?

there is no home there is only corporations and profit

Physically impossible. Even if spaceflight becomes perfectly efficient, it'll still take a certain baseline amount of energy to conduct which utterly dwarfs the energy and effort needed to dig a fucking hole and then process whatever you dug up to produce what you want.

processing millions of lbs of dirt/rock for 1 lb of something useful ain't free in $ or energy
And then there are environment costs/political costs along with the strategic need to ensure access to materials

Can't rely on chinks for all the rare metals forever

Energy cost is irrelevant as well, only thing that matters is dollars.

Materials mined in space wouldn't return to earth, which is why it's a scam from the perspective of an average pleb.

now why would you think this?
Rather than running out hundreds/thousands of trucks work out of materials all across the world
You could just drop the thousands of tons from orbit.

>processing millions of lbs of dirt/rock for 1 lb of something useful ain't free in $ or energy
No, not free, but still far cheaper than both the monetary and economic cost of spaceflight.

Fuck, even He-3, which is probably the most expensive substance per pound there is, is still cheaper to produce by fissile nucleosynthesis (of all things) than it is to bring back from the Moon where it's relatively plentiful.

>Pretty fucking sure as technology improves, asteroid,mining will be a muchore attractive alternative,to obtain resources than smashing a bunch of atoms

Asteroid mining or colonization of space is never ever going to happen unless we devise a new fuel or other method of getting into orbit. Period, it is just too damned expensive to launch large pieces of equipment into space.

It's economics... it's math.

like so?
youtube.com/watch?v=ztrU90Ub4Uw

>Energy cost is irrelevant as well, only thing that matters is dollars.
What is energy cost measured in again?

Also, bring the fucking numbers to the table, people, don't just sit around wanking to your own beliefs. Let the mathfags do the calculations and discuss viability then, not with one guy thinking it doesn't cost shit and one guy thinking it costs metric fucktons?

Yes because what it cost to do in the spaceshuttle is totally the same as fully reusable rockets made by SpaceX or Blue Origin, right?

When space launch is 100 times cheaper in a decade or two, will you say the same thing?

The economic cost of mining will only INCREASE, as the easily accessed stuff is used up
Do you think there is an infinity of materials to be accessed on the earth surface?

Musk claims that fuel costs for their rocket is only 200,000.
For 20 tons to LEO

Thats the part of being an advancing civilization, using more & more energy per capita

How is that doing anyway? NASA make any headway?

>using more & more energy per capita
Only if you literally kill your R&D department.

>He-3, which is probably the most expensive substance per pound there is, is still cheaper to produce by fissile nucleosynthesis
If you are going to process ore anyway it makes sense to recover the He3 and in that case it won't be too expensive.

Metal on the Moon can be sued for huge space projects such as solar power satellites, space mirrors, space radio telescopes etc. That means refining a lot of ore.

A Caterpillar 797F ultra class haul truck consumes 60-80 US gallons of diesel fuel per hour during average use.

Undern extreme conditions (crazy slope, bad road conditions under overloading) they can go above 100 US gallons an hour.

Each one brand new costs anywhere between MM $5 - MM $20

just to put a few things into perspective

Fucking tragic considering locomotives get something like 480mpg/ton. Then again at notch 8 each locomotive (4+) might burn 200g/h, but that's with a load that might gross around 20,000 tons, and they're moving at up to 55mph.

I would love to get some numbers on this and try to compare them apples to apples

from my understanding, these trucks are actually EXTREMELY efficient. its just that they're hauling a fuckload of shit.

god damnit i want to learn about econ of trains vs traditional freight vs haul trucks now

my guess is that if you have a long project life (10+ years, maybe? probably depends on size of project) that train would be the most economical option.

>bring it back to earth
>price of platinum drops substantially

>launching stuff is hard and expensive

This is precisely the argument for asteroid mining since it requires mere fractions of the delta-v to put something in LEO. Essentially it boils down to two approaches: mine the stuff near the rock, use hohmann transfer to lower orbit, or move the rock to earth orbit and mine it there.

Ironic that you provided the perfect reason why mining in space is the most cost-effective option both in fiscal terms and in terms of energy and material costs while trying to argue against it.

>Only if you literally kill your R&D department.
Using New York City as an example it uses more electricity now than the entire country did in the 1920's, so no, you're wrong.

I don't know what the units are, but one of the mismatchers at the mine I worked at said their biggest haul truck could fill 2 coal cars, which would net around 180 tons. Which specific unit that was I don't know. What I can tell you is that Caterpillar does manufacture locomotives via their subsidiary EMD, I'd posit that they share technology pretty openly so you can imagine they share similar efficiency parameters.

Beyond fuel though is a different question, laying rail is incredibly expensive even with the modern equipment used to place and maintain it. I'd say 10 years wouldn't cut it unless you were pushing some really high demand shit at a really high volume.

picture vaguely related, it's a tie puller.
youtube.com/watch?v=ERBDh8kRlHE

>it boils down to two approaches: mine the stuff near the rock, use hohmann transfer to lower orbit, or move the rock to earth orbit and mine it there.
I don't see how the latter is even an option. An asteroid isn't even solid ore, let alone solid refined material. Moving the entire asteroid, which has a mass several orders of magnitude greater than the portion which you actually wish to utilize, is simply absurd. Moving even raw ore, which still generally weighs several times as much as refined material, seems rather wasteful. It seems to me that the most practical option by far is to set up mining, refining and perhaps even manufacturing on the asteroid itself, to minimize the amount of mass needed to launch and maneuver about the Solar System by as much as possible.

You ever been to a mine, boy?
This is a crusher, and a really fucking small one. It weighs 73,855lbs dry. It'd be a hell of a lot more efficient, on the basis of this thing's necessity alone, just to drag one back to LEO.

>I don't see how the latter is even an option.
Thankfully I'm here to help.

>An asteroid isn't even solid ore, let alone solid refined material.
That really doesn't matter at all, terrestrial mines don't have an amazing ore/waste rock ratio so even if the target asteroid is only half ore it's still a viable option. Plus this is space we're talking about, most of the rocks out there are almost solid iron or nickel ore so the "waste" is very usable.

>Moving the entire asteroid, which has a mass several orders of magnitude greater than the portion which you actually wish to utilize, is simply absurd.
>Moving even raw ore, which still generally weighs several times as much as refined material, seems rather wasteful.
I would ask you to explain this but I think I know where you're having an issue: you're stuck in "we need to use rockets" mode. There's so many options available that it stops becoming a "waste" issue and starts becoming a time issue. So weigh that against:
>It seems to me that the most practical option by far is to set up mining, refining and perhaps even manufacturing on the asteroid itself
Sure, it might be more sensible to put the refining process smack dab in the middle of the solar system (where the asteroids are so conveniently located) in the long term but you need to consider setup costs, transit time, and where those resources need to go. Initially there is only one place in our solar system where we need to bring raw materials: Earth orbit. We can't really go and set everything up without first building there anyway, so moving the raw ore (and waste rock) to the work site is going to be more efficient.

Actually we do that very thing here on Earth. I know first-hand that the taconite mined in Minnesota is shipped in bulk to refineries elsewhere; we don't handle the refining here at all. (I am not familiar with any ore refinery in Minnesota)

Plus this user is correct:

Pretend this is in the post above:
>from my understanding, these trucks are actually EXTREMELY efficient. its just that they're hauling a fuckload of shit.
They are an they aren't, the major thing is these trucks are not the primary means of transportation for ore or waste rock. Whatever digging operations that are going on happen far away from the railhead so moving ore falls on these heavy trucks, they actually first take the ore and rock to crushers (if a mobile one isn't present) which then deposits the crushed ore on a conveyor which places it on the train. Depending on the ore being mined the actual "rocks" can weigh several tons each so the hauling vehicle needs to be enormous.

Plus the mine itself is constantly changing, the topography is not going to remain the same over the course of operations no matter the type of mine. Pit mines are probably the most dramatic in this regard, they follow available ore and the corners the trucks need to take are simply far too sharp for rail traffic. When they're at the bottom it's a matter of moving through a carefully choreographed scene of the actual mining operations themselves; rails would severely complicate all of this.

Really it's like having a few tremendously strong men carrying goods down some stairs and loading a horse cart. Getting that horse and cart up the stairs to the source is cost prohibitive, so it's just easier and more efficient to use the manpower to make up the difference.

I think its a convenience thing. Why haul ore and fuel with you when you can mine it from some rocks in space that are closer to your space base.

>Space Mining
We'll get there eventually, bros

This was the first step:
nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/3Dratchet_wrench

Pic related is the start of a glorious self-sufficient space base