Space General

So whats up with the silence around the eventual expiration date of ISS?
I read a while ago that the russians wanted to do their own base.
Are all the country's going to do their own spacestation or what?

I know the ISS is a moneysink, but still, i think as a race we should keep a constant human presence up there.

OP, can one colonize an asteroid

Reminder that this is the real reason space colonization must happen ASAP

This is something flat earthers never answer. When you talk about the curvature they just change topic or don't respond.

I am not certain if they are trolling or just really stupid.

Space generals never work, I tried them back in the day and they always fall into bickering and trolling.

I heard that they were trying to sell it some private enterprise. The future of space is in the hands of corporations because governments are too cucked.

We will prob end up colonizing Ceres at some point

Fingers crossed! I wanna sun bath on dat bright spot

Has anyone here watched the entire Cosmos series? I tried watching without being pretentious but christ I could not finish the first episode. It felt like a kid show.

I'm not sure if people understand the logistics of mining. I'm a Red Seal Electrician and I specialize in heavy industrial applications. Open pit, under ground, shale oil, tar sands, etc... mostly in North America but I've ran and commissioned a few jobs in the Gulf.

Perhaps if the asteroid was a solid chunk of platinum... maybe... maybe.

How the fuck are we going to set up conveyors, crushers, etc in space? Where the fuck would we refine the ore? I mean I understand it's a untapped resource but it's like telling the Roman's to mine the Diamonds in the Northwest Territories.

>How the fuck are we going to set up conveyors, crushers, etc in space? Where the fuck would we refine the ore?
What do you call this argument? Appeal to failure of imagination?

We won't mine them. AI controlled robots will.
Drink bleach.

Thats pretty much the whole point. Its to pick up where Sagan left of, inspiring kids and people who get confused by big words

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What's your problem? Hand-waving at straightforward, obviously solvable problems is not an argument.

Apologies, quoted the wrong post.

what are seasons

Musk from reddit ama the other day:
>Initially, glass panes with carbon fiber frames to build geodesic domes on the surface, plus a lot of miner/tunneling droids. With the latter, you can build out a huge amount of pressurized space for industrial operations and leave the glass domes for green living space.
That's kind of how I picture things would turn out after awhile, but the first colony seems like it would be more pic related.

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damn that thing is huge.
It will be really funny to see in 20 years when the damn thing is finished that its only half the size it was on paper.

It is a kid show.

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if you really want to combo break them ask them about stellar parallax or the solar point (when theres no shadows)

People like me all around the globe believe the earth is flat.

a lot of people think mutilating your dick is normal too.

I have a geophysics bs and am getting into software development

what should I do to increase chances of working in this industry?

>How the fuck are we going to set up conveyors, crushers, etc in space? Where the fuck would we refine the ore?
?
Why do you imagine these things couldn't work in space? Obviously it would need some changes but it's still all workable

The ISS is nothing more than a grandiose science fair project. That blue state fair ribbon is a joke considering the billions piled into it. We're gonna light cigars and deorbit that bitch into the sea, have ourselves a drink and take a thick meaty dump on your girlfriend's chest and piss on her Us magazines on her coffee table. Your mothers got front row tickets.

Reminder: this is the real reason that population exists in the first place.

No one has any fucking idea on this board the logistics of mining, drilling, processing or refining. It's all third grade education; magic wand waving bullshit. "Just swap out the diesel power rigs with AC and run the whole thing on batteries". Rabbit hole after goat path of silly, poor thought out sheet pulling to make it look pretty. I mean here we are, barely bounced around on the moon and tomorrow we're gonna be mudboggin' in dump trucks on an asteroid. Ridiculous doesn't even begin to scratch it. Not to mention the total lack of economic viability since it would be prohibitively expensive bringing it back to the earth's surface.

implying the sheer quantities those meteors have to offer wont affect the price of the substances in any way

Not to deliberately shit in anyone's potatoes, but how exactly can you fund asteroid mining on $20 million dollars? The average cost of an offshore oil platform is $650 million. Planetary Resources raised $21.1 million in Series A financing

you kind of derailed after droping the ISS in the sea.

Too sweet

no
obviously not
but its good starting funds, maybe
and then they get the next couple hundred million to throw probes at asteroids/moon

The incentives are in place. Lets wait for the cost to drop a little bit further.

>the cost
The biggest investment in human history.
We are talking about decades of operating at a loss before it will ever be profitable.
Nobody wants to pay that bill.

Oh lord. Everything is in the hands of corpo today, that's why goverments are cucked and we - enslaved.
Thanks to ISS humankind can perform science experiments that are impossible anywhere else. This makes it invaluable. Or at least capitalist will tell you it's shit and keep on destroying the invironment, because somehow our extinction is economically viable.

Not fan of China, but at least their govt has their corpos on the leash. We will see some serious shit coming from that direction, while west economies will devour themselves.

Really short on actual mining procedure. I don't think you could get more handwavy and popsci than robots and magnets. Then if it wasn't absurd enough, an asteroid prophylactic. More SV logic.

It's more of a joke when you hear people say this is going to replace earth side depletion.

On the earth you have only a small segment of the planet that is productively mineable.

So I think its easily possible for them to find some asteroids worth mining. Then you just crash it into the earth or put it into orbit.

If, and only if, an actual space side market develops. It's uneconomic to bring back to earth

Keep dreaming.

?
Its just as easy to bring it to earth as to back to orbit

>easy
>never been done
How exactly are you manipulating its trajectory?

in the near term, the main thing we're mining from asteroids is water. Extracting this is relatively easy. You put the asteroid in a bag and heat it, condensing out water from the bag.

Although there are more fleshed out proposals for doing this:
nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Cohen_2012_PhI_RAP.pdf

solar panels + using the waste materials of the asteroid

I know ejecting waste material from a well lit, ill defined mining op is solid mathematics all around, but what exactly are the solar panels for? I'm a bit slow on the uptake.

>I'm a bit slow
You probably need some solar panels to get you speeding in the right direction.

Not him, but it sounds like a solar powered mass driver is being described. Isp is low, but who cares you have the mass of an asteroid for reaction mass.

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Get that gay shit out of here

Which reminds me...Mars is going to need alot of hydrocarbons and Earth is an excellent source of them.

Why

Where else is your power coming from?

>space economy
>with chemical rockets
Yeah...that's not going to happen.

Nuclear is approaching faster than you think

>
>People like me all around the globe believe the earth is flat.
sides are in orbit

Bump

what about a controlled deorbit of the asteroid?
crash is somewhere remote and then pick up the pieces

Anyone else hyped for Mars kino?
youtube.com/watch?v=mPuTlZYDbh4
channel.nationalgeographic.com/mars/videos/novo-mundo/

I'm sure this thing will trigger so much autism and butthurt on this bord that you could power the fucking MCT into GTO on hate alone. So yeah, I'm pretty hyped desu

Btw, the first actual episode shows what SpaceX's meetings about Mars colonization are like, pic related.

Not sure if b8 or retard

>fanboyism full tilt

Did anyone see this bit about NASA's plan to get commercial partners into cis-lunar space?

arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/six-contractors-have-begun-work-on-nasas-gateway-to-deep-space/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Space_Technologies_for_Exploration_Partnerships

proposal from boeing (pic related)
>Boeing is developing a modular habitat system that leverages experience in designing, developing, assembling on-orbit, and safely operating the International Space Station for over 15 years.

lockheed martin's proposal
>Lockheed Martin will refurbish a multi-purpose logistics module, like those that were used to carry equipment and supplies to and from the station aboard the space shuttle, into a full-scale habitat prototype that will include integrated avionics and ECLSS.

ars is a tech news site but they have some good science writers there too

>NanoRacks. in conjunction with its partners, Space Systems Loral and the United Launch Alliance, referred to collectively as the Ixion Team, will conduct a comprehensive feasibility study regarding the conversion of an existing launch vehicle’s upper stage, or propellant segment, into a pressurized habitable volume in space.

i kind of hope that nanoracks or bigelow wins the competition

bigelow
>Bigelow Aerospace will develop and test a prototype of XBASE (Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement), a 330 cubic meter expandable habitat and test platform for deep space hardware.

not as established as the major players like boeing, lockheed, or ula, but bigelow has several space station modules in space for years now...i heard bigelow is a cunt tho and doesn't play nice with others

sierra nevada (same guys that worked on the dreamchaser mini shuttle)
>Sierra Nevada Corporation will study and refine a flexible architecture and concept of operations for a deep space habitat that leverages three to four commercial launches to construct a modular long-duration habitat.

orbital atk
>Orbital ATK will mature the mission architecture and design of their initial cislunar habitat concept, based on the Cygnus spacecraft that currently services the space station.

i kind of like the idea of having a space station at one of the earth/moon lagrange points

Is antarctica a myth then? Or is it the edge of the earth?

They always say it's due to lens distortion.

Initial financing is supposed to go towards survey telescopes to identify candidates for mining, also getting a revenue source by selling telescope time.

All fanboy-whoring aside, I'll be happy as long as anything like this gets done, no matter the company.

i think its like 80/20. A lot of trolls, and a few honest believers.

What engineering discipline should I pursue if I want to be among the first to mine asteroids?

From the same company that wanted to do space selfies... Either way, that's the easy part. It's nothing but vaporware until some actual engineering is shown. Saying: we'll use AC power rigs with batteries and solar panels is beyond fucking clueless

Unless there's a quantum leap in technology, it's not happening in your lifetime.

Get it from the lakes of Titan.

>lockheed martin's proposal
OK, so you have a few grillion dollars to pour out of the window for a product that will work as well as F-35 after epic delays??

The Chinese will have occupied the entire Moon before then.

Hey Veeky Forums
Sorry if it's a tad off topic, but I couldn't find astronomy general, nor felt like creating a new thread just for this
What constellation is this? I went through the list of known constellations, but couldn't find it there

Why the fuck do you need to ship hydrocarbons all the way from another moon or planet to Mars?

Mars does not have an oxygen atmosphere, so you can't burn them unless you make oxygen.

Splitting 2 mol water to make 1 mole of oxygen requires 571.6 kj/mol oxygen produced

n-nonane, C9H20 has a standard enthalpy of formation of -229.3 kj/mol

The reaction for combustion is:

C9H20 + 14 O2(g) ----> 9 CO2(g) + 10 H2O(g)

so this reaction yields:
(9* -393.509 kj/mol + 10*-241.8 kj/mol) - (-229.3 kj/mol)

(9* -393.509 + 10*-241.8 ) - (-229.3 )=-5730 kj/mol

So overall we have:
14*571.6 kj/mol -5730 kj/mol= 2274 kj/mol required for this reaction

In other words burning hydrocarbons on Mars is just a really shitty way to use solar or nuclear power.

Hydrocarbons are used for more than just energy.

Kind of looks like small bear (ursa minor) but should have one more star on the tail, lol.

You should be more optimistic. While the infrastructure and resources required is immense, you still seem see the space age of the 70's, we are more than capable and it is economically viable, once the initial steps have been taken.
I also don't see bringing it back to the earth's surface as the limiting factor. A decently calculated trajectory, heat shielding and some parachutes is all that is needed there as I see it.

I see the following as limiting factors:
Initial costs (beyond immense)
Technological maturity

These are limiting in the short term and related enough that once one is overcome the other will follow. That is what is currently happening and why we see companies waiting to jump on the band wagon.
A whole new type of economy will rise from this once the first profits are made.
If you have a unmanned processing facility on Phobos, for instance, you can sling resources around the solar system with minimal energy costs, if you control the majority of resources in space you control the solar system. The opportunities are more than immense, the financially dominant families and companies of the next 10000 years are going to be determined in the next 50.

You don't. If really big money does not come along to fund it (it will eventually) it won't start successfully. Luckily greed is a thing. The concept of owning and retrieving trillions of dollars worth of resources, even if its still stuck in space will be a key driving force.

Why don't they take a hint from scifi. Throw a net around it and blow it the fuck up (small scale obv.).

Implying the sheer idiocy one would need to crash the market of a resource you have major control over.

Don't listen to
It is happening in your lifetime. More than these guys know will happen in our lifetimes. We are at the most crucial point a species can be at. If it was a common occurrence for life to get past where we are now, the fermi paradox would not exist. We need as many people as possible to bring us forward as quickly as possible.

Electrical Engineering (with a focus on mechatronics) and geology.

Join me.