Does Veeky Forums think asteroid mining is feasible and if not why not?

Does Veeky Forums think asteroid mining is feasible and if not why not?

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youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g
arxiv.org/abs/1304.5082
nasa.gov/feature/apis-asteroid-provided-in-situ-supplies-100mt-of-water-from-a-single-falcon-9/
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>is it feasible to mine resources that are more easily accessible on Earth
yes, why not

Nothing could be easier than mining shit on Earth
Asteroid mining is a meme, that won't happen

Yes, but only for use in space

Why? There is an abundance of materials and we are already seeing companies sending out satellites to scan for possible targets.

What will we be doing in space? If you answered nothing then you'd be right

People will be going where there are other concentrations of people, where there are jobs, where there is gravity/large bodies

All the resources needed for on the moon will be mined on the moon
Same as mars, same as jupiter, etc

Theres an abundance HERE too
There is no shortage of any resources on Earth

So would these materials just be used for tools and equipment for exploring our solar system? Is there no hopes of bringing them for use on Earth?

I think its a bit of an exaggeration to say we'll be doing "nothing" in space.

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So you don't see hopes for it even for it to be used in exploration of our solar system? I mean I understand that we may not bring back the materials but could we not use it to generate fuel for unmanned ships which could reduce the price of space travel?

thorium fags,
asteroid mining fags,
consider this:

youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g

That asteroid is too small to be involved in this discussion take your tiny ass asteroid elsewhere

Retarded meme like the orbiting upside down skyscraper.

True. Its all here. Its just scattered, or at the centre of the earth where the temperature is 7000K.

Try reconstituting or recovering it. See how much energy it takes.

Rertard.

No, it just doesn't make sense, you have to brake at an asteroid, you can't go into orbit like you could around Jupiter or w/e

But that's part of why it's feasible.

you're a dumbass fucking consumer

By near earth asteroids I'm talking about asteroids in the inner and middle region of the asteroid belt, we already have launched probes to study these asteroids, I'm asking whether or not we could mine their resources, either for extraction back to Earth or to synthesize fuel in space effectively acting as a "gas station" in space.

>asteroids in the inner and middle region of the asteroid belt
Those aren't NEAs user. However there's plenty NEAs even if they aren't part of any asteroid belt.

Also mining on Earth is one of the hardest things to do retard, "rare earth metals" are not that rare with the exception of some radioactive ones. Cerium has similar abundance to copper but these elements are so scattered or in the most awkward positions in the mantle that it makes no sense to mine for them with such low concentration.

all of those elements are scattered in asteroids too, user

Only if.

>Musks plan to reduce space access by a factor 100 works out.
>It can be done fully done fully autonomous

There is no way sending humans out there could ever make it cost effective.

Actually, asteroid mining only makes sense if you're building stuff in space.

There isn't going to be solid platinum asteroids, maybe there will be one or two that is worth mining but thats all there will be.

afaik there aren't any good near earth destinations, and if you are going past mars well, might as well head to ceres.

Well there is no real need for humans to go to space anyway, machines are more durable and we don't have to involve so many life support systems.

Well you don't really build anything in space proper, even if it's another planet or moon you're still flying the materials to a far off destination, why not Earth?

Asteroids with high metallic content are remnants of planets which never formed fully or collided with others and scattered into many different pieces, therefore if we assume that they still contain similar abundances surely it is easier to mine them as we only have to mine objects with diameters of 300m compared to diameters of earth which has a diameter of around 13000km

No it's not. Asteroids have no atmosphere or hydrosphere, meaning no differentiation processes either. There is no element in periodic table that's not more accessible on Earth, even if assuming massive cost drops in accessing space.

Iridium mining is the only thing profitable enough to justify it at this stage.

A Falcon 9 and a Dragon1 capsule can return enough iridium per use to profit millions.

He also ignores the energy required to literally move the material to earth

asteroid mining will never happen

Plenty of NEAs can be moved to L1 or L2 in the Earth-Moon system for

>[citation required, lol]

This.

>Earth-Moon
Should be Sun-Earth

You could, but its worth an extra 10k per lb when its in space.

arxiv.org/abs/1304.5082

C type asteroids contain up to 20% water, and no, elements are hard to get on Earth, I've made this point already but due to the size of the mantle and how valuable elements are scattered all over the crust, for reference it took us 20 years to dig the deepest hole ever and that isn't even half the distance to the mantle. Metallic Asteroids are shards of destroyed planet cores, this means that those inaccessible metals could well be found on the surface of these asteroids which we could use.

Energy requirements? Terrestrial mining will eventually lead us to dig deeper for metals, you do understand that the further deep we go into the Earth's crust the higher the pressure and temperature becomes in fact there are points where rocks behave like plastics due to the immense pressure and temperature. Therefore those mines would need a force to counteract this pressure.

L1 isn't stable with out station keeping.

Earth-Moon L4 L5 are better options.

No, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a child.

Wow.

I never thought of that.

Thank you for enlightening me, oh great genius of Veeky Forums.

Any sort of reasoning behind that?

You are welcome, unenlightened cretin.

>gas station in space
You can do that with a station and it's far cheaper than lugging and processing asteroids. It's not being done because nobody wants to go anywhere.

Asteroid mining is the perfect way of tanking the metal markets
- obliterating China's hold on rare earth metals
- annihilating African countries' hold on tantalum, chrome and uranium
- shredding former Soviet republics hold on other strategic metals.

This can do to metal markets what US slate oil is doing to the Middle East oil nations.

In order of nearest feasibility:
Refueling satellites. Satellites need to expend propellant so they can stay in the correct orbit for making money

Constructing the 'dumb' parts of satellites in space. IE we can launch satellite cores with the latest electronics and dock them with a huge radio dish built in orbit. Hell you could even add a 'bunker' to protect all thos3 expensive money making electronics from micrometeorites and radiation. This lets us do more with what we launch from the ground.

Space based solar power. It's still too expensive to launch a solar power satellite from the ground.

Building space hotels. So people can pretend to be astronauts. This also enables space casinos for extraction of money from tourists.

Eventually we can use said resources to build space colonies. So instead of living on mars, which is cold and doesn't have earth gravity, we can live in colonies with whatever climate we want with full 1 g.

>he thinks people will have working colonies on other planets in this solar system

Dumb idea. "water rich" asteroid is a relative term... they have almost no water, some just have a tiny amount. None have enough to make rocket fuel.

The rare earth elements are also not accessible. They bound up in iron-nickel alloy, not concentrated.

>MOM I POSTED IT AGAIN!

Satellite propellant needs are negeligible, and no satellite existing today can be "refilled"

Every part of a satellite is delicate high tech electronics
There is no such manufacturing in space and there won't be.

Once shipping costs are reduced to a small multipler of fuel, it'll be basically the same price to fly something intercontinentally as it would be to launch it to orbit.

It's like pretending the dirt in your backyard could be turned into rocket fuel or solar panels or w/e, its fantasy

>> almost no water
5-15% percent of the total mass of an asteroid could be water based on CI and CM type meteorites.

1 falcon 9 launch could return metric tons of water:
nasa.gov/feature/apis-asteroid-provided-in-situ-supplies-100mt-of-water-from-a-single-falcon-9/

>> no existing satellite can be refilled
Except that robotic satellite refueling with standard connectors already on satellites has already been demonstrated on the ISS with the Robotic Refueling Mission.

Bigger issue now is that near term, water is the only thing we can harvest from asteroids, while satellites primarily run on nitrogen tetroxide/hydrazine.

No you dont, you can move with it at relative speed and land

Not every part of a satellite is high tech electronics. Pic related is Terrestar-1 which is perhaps the largest commericial satellite in orbit. The big gold thing is a radio reflector, it's entirely passive and allows the satellite to cover the whole USA. It is simply a conductive piece of metal in the right shape. There is no reason we couldn't lop off a chunk of iron asteroid and form it into the correct shape.

>>no manufacturing in space
Wrong, NASA has manufactured parts in space using a 3D printer on the ISS.

Sure launch costs will get lower, but in the end the delta V cost to LEO ain't gonna change any time soon. Once we have the tech to do so we will do it.

>> fly something intercontinentally
However, in general we don't move things that have a low value per unit mass like iron or oil between continents using airplanes.

>> dirt in your backyard could be turned into rocket fuel or solar panels
And what pray tell makes it impossible to produce rocket fuel and solar panels from dirt?

Isnt some sort of AI pretty much a requirement for this to become successful?

That depends on your definition of AI, but the answer is probably yes.

we can probably get away with robots that are as smart as insects. Where we treat our asteroid mine as something like a robotic ant colony, with a number of different robots specializing in different tasks. That being said insects are way better at what they do than robots.

Now what would really, really help would be to solve robot grasping. Robots aren't good at manipulating stuff on their own. If we can solve this it makes it easy to fix things remotely even with huge time lag. Now the human can tell the robot what to manipulate rather than moving an arm around with a joystick.

Thanks for the detailed reply.
I vaguely recall seeing some videos of some impressive robotic near human like hands before what about those? But even with really good hands it would have to have the intelligence to know the best ways to use them properly.

Having human like hands is one thing, knowing how to control them is another. It's a software problem not a hardware problem.

>> intelligence to use them properly
Sort of this, but we don't need robots to have human level intelligence.

For example, our robot does not need to know how to troubleshoot and fix rock grinder, it just needs to be able to remove the rock jamming things up that the human on the ground identifies.

>Having human like hands is one thing, knowing how to control them is another. It's a software problem not a hardware problem.
Sounds like you're saying we can build the hardware but the software hasnt caught up yet. What approaches are we trying to make software able to control such hardware? Is it sup/unsup ML?

Finally someone gets it.

Other than what some of the other replies have mentioned:
>Solar powered server farms, we can always use bigger better computers
>Space manufacturing of things which can only easily be made in microgravity and/or vaccum (just imagine how much easier vacuum deposition would be)
>Extraordinarily easier to create artificial satellites for communication and military purposes
>Deep space missiles for stealth military purposes
>Mining of elements which are very rare on earth, but plentiful in space (iridium, helium-3)
And further in the future
>The migration of all heavy industry and farming to space as the climate on earth becomes to inhospitable
>The eventual migration of humans to the sanctuary of space as all ecosystems begin to collapse and/or adapt in ways that are not hospitable for human life on earth

The problem is scale, for which there are few solutions.

Google has had some interesting results having a bunch of robot arms doing machine learning on picking stuff up.

They train a neural network to predict if a given set of motor inputs will be successful based upon camera input.

>It's a software problem not a hardware problem.

No its 100% a hardware problem

And what makes you say that?

>> server farms
If you want uninterrupted solar power you need to be pretty far from the earth, this means high latency

>> can only easily be made in microgravity
Such as? 3d printing does better at making metal foam, only with better properties than foam
>> vacuum
Also makes certain manufacturing processes hard. Machining, which we use for pretty much all precision machinery, becomes pretty much impossible in a vacuum because of vacuum welding and the inability to use fluids. It is difficult to do in a space station because of the vibrations produced aren't dissapated very well.

>> space missiles
Questionable by terms of outer space treaty
>>stealth
There ain't no stealth in space
>> iridium
I was going to say no, it makes more sense to mine it on earth, but then again worldwide production is only about 3 tons per year.

>> helium-3
For what? Fusion doesn't work yet.

Not as much energy as it takes to get a kilogram into space.

Prove it. Delta V to low earth orbit is 9.3-10 km/s.

Spess bump

It wouldn't be very hard to mine asteroids if we could just attract asteroids to land by the ocean.
Just put a very strong magnet by the coast of Nevada or something. It should be pretty easy considering we have the science.

Dont listen to the tards in this thread.

the simple answer is yes, we COULD mine asteroids in the future, but we cant do that right now.

>but when?

Who the fuck knows? every word people that are for/against this idea say is pure speculation.

The short answer is; we will be able to do it when we are able to do it.

Its a lame answer, it sounds redundant, but its true.

desu probably not in our lifetimes imo.

Non-physicsfag here. Why can't we land on astroids to mine them?

>$5 Trillion worth of water

How much is that in litres?

>arxiv.org/abs/1304.5082
This paper was rejected and they never updated it.

A giant space ship/station, A Mars-Earth transit vessel, ect...

You can't land on an object with no real gravitational field. The best you can really do is grab hold of it.

The main challenges in asteroid mining really come from designing mining/collection mechanisms that work in zero-G and launching them into space.

Shit video. He confused second and third cosmic velocity.

No, because even though at current prices resources are so cheap that many recycling methods aren't cost competitive, asteroid mining has no chance in hell to be cost competitive to recycling.

lmao stop lying you dumb fucker. the pre-print was just the first result on google. Here is the version published (pic because spam filter).

If you can process asteroid metals and use them to build factories and spaceships, and also gather and sell fuel to people flying around the solar system, you could make shitloaxs of money. The people who most consistently made money during the Gold Rush were the people who sold the miners pickaxes and Mining supplies-the people who,enable relatively easy solar system exploration and colonization will make a fortune.

>posts pic with fake link
back to /pol/

>people flying around the solar system
But you don't have a reason for many people to fly around the solar system in the first place (inb4 asteroid mining)

Bump

Please tell me youre trolling

3pbp

Around 250000 litres, assuming SapceX's value that 1 kilo of any substance in space is around $20000