What's stopping us from grabbing 16 Psyche?
September 21, 2021 9:36 PM Subscribe
Even if 16 Psyche is worth 1% of it's supposed potential value it would still be worth spending many billions to get our hands on it. What are the sticking points?
One could imagine sending up a set of robotic rocket engines and a string of periodic refueling drones to keep them going. Years of playing with orbit simulators leaves me thinking that we don't have to deflect it *that* far to start it on a few decades trip to earth orbit (or just hard land it on the moon). While the project would be massively complex, it seems like we have all the basic components we need to do it.
I know I am giving Pollyanna a run for her money here and I'm hoping someone can comment on exactly where my rosy vision is hiding real problems.
One could imagine sending up a set of robotic rocket engines and a string of periodic refueling drones to keep them going. Years of playing with orbit simulators leaves me thinking that we don't have to deflect it *that* far to start it on a few decades trip to earth orbit (or just hard land it on the moon). While the project would be massively complex, it seems like we have all the basic components we need to do it.
I know I am giving Pollyanna a run for her money here and I'm hoping someone can comment on exactly where my rosy vision is hiding real problems.
All the articles valuing it at a zillion skillion dollars are just clickbait.
Gold and other precious metals are valuable largely because of their rarity. They do have industrial and practical applications, but the constrained supply is what makes them worth so much. If you towed a solid gold asteroid the size of Texas into orbit and started bringing great chunks back to Earth, its commodity value would instantly collapse because its arrival would make gold about as commonplace as dirt.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:16 PM on September 21, 2021 [6 favorites]
Gold and other precious metals are valuable largely because of their rarity. They do have industrial and practical applications, but the constrained supply is what makes them worth so much. If you towed a solid gold asteroid the size of Texas into orbit and started bringing great chunks back to Earth, its commodity value would instantly collapse because its arrival would make gold about as commonplace as dirt.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:16 PM on September 21, 2021 [6 favorites]
It takes energy ( = money ) to get stuff down the gravity well in a controlled manner, so just getting it to earth orbit isn't necessarily the hardest/most expensive part.
Also, as Rhaomi says, if you were to suddenly inject some extremely large quantity of rare material [x] into the market, you run the risk of crashing the price on [x], since there's no longer scarcity.
As long as it's cheaper not to do it, capitalist society won't do it. Assuming we don't mess up the planet too badly to muster a launch effort, the corollary of this is "if it becomes cheaper to do it, we'll do it." Even then, this is a plan that's going to take many years when most boards think in terms of quarters, so that's a challenge, too. (But do note the Alberta tar sands -- when the price of gas went up, oil companies spent a lot of money setting up infrastructure to extract the relatively-more-expensive oil from the tar sands). Not saying I believe it's ethical/a good idea to do this, but that's how I model the businesses/governments' thinking on the idea.
posted by Alterscape at 10:20 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
Also, as Rhaomi says, if you were to suddenly inject some extremely large quantity of rare material [x] into the market, you run the risk of crashing the price on [x], since there's no longer scarcity.
As long as it's cheaper not to do it, capitalist society won't do it. Assuming we don't mess up the planet too badly to muster a launch effort, the corollary of this is "if it becomes cheaper to do it, we'll do it." Even then, this is a plan that's going to take many years when most boards think in terms of quarters, so that's a challenge, too. (But do note the Alberta tar sands -- when the price of gas went up, oil companies spent a lot of money setting up infrastructure to extract the relatively-more-expensive oil from the tar sands). Not saying I believe it's ethical/a good idea to do this, but that's how I model the businesses/governments' thinking on the idea.
posted by Alterscape at 10:20 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
Asteroid mining is an idea which will come, but the state of the art isn't there yet. If you want to read more about it ... I think Alexis Gilliland's Rosinante trilogy is wonderful, but not everyone I've recommended it to agrees. It provides a very good overview of a company setting up an asteroid mining process.
Rosinante also makes a point that most people aren't ready to hear yet: once you're out in space, the concept of scarce resources becomes meaningless. We're limited by being at the bottom of a very deep gravity well. Once you're out of that, you can go where you want, and the resources you need are waiting to be picked up.
I don't think 16 Psyche is special. There are over a million asteroids more than a mile long, and probably billions of smaller ones. The techniques detailed in G. Harry Stine's The Third Industrial Revolution can be used to refine them. Saturn's rings contain a volume of 99.9% pure water equal to about about 75% of what we have on Earth, and they're not the only other body of water in the solar system.
This, of course, makes a lot of SF and TV shows ridiculous. A common plot is that a group of honest, hardworking miners are threatened by bandits trying to steal the gold they've dug out of an asteroid. Gold is scarce and valuable here on Earth. In space that's unlikely to be the case, and Rosinante plays with this idea.
On Earth you have access to the surface, and you can easily dig down hundreds of feet.
Asteroids come in all sizes, and they just have to be smelted or refined. If you have to dig into one, it's probably easier to find one small enough to melt and refine.
It's difficult to comprehend just how much matter is out there. It's quite possible, depending on the process used, that small asteroids will be more valuable than big ones because they don't have to be cut up to be processed.
Psyche is maybe the core of a planet. The asteroid belt is maybe a planet that didn't condense into a ball. Asteroids are mostly either nickel-iron or carbon, both of which will likely be valuable in space. You can also ship them back to Earth and save refining metals in the ecosphere, but when people move out into space some will stay there, and a lot of your market will be out of the atmosphere.
Why haven't we done this yet?
- We're making great strides in space. This doesn't mean we're ready to gram an asteroid, even one passing Earth closely. We need a presence in orbit, so we don't have to ship everything up, dash after an asteroid, and then quickly refine it and land it.
- We don't really have a handle on the negative effects of radiation and of zero-G.
- We have no idea how to set up a self-contained ecosystem. I suspect that the smaller your ship, the more difficult it is to keep your ecology stable. You can't stay in space long if you have to ship your food and air up. I don't know what the minimum viable size is, but I suspect a fairly large rotating ring structure - say 1000 feet in diameter - would be a good start while we learn the subtleties. I believe this can be done, but there'll be a learning curve.
- A source of fuel off-Earth will make things vastly easier.
- Processing facilities in space are pretty much essential. You're going to have a much easier time landing manufactured goods and refined metals than crashing thousands of tons of steel into the ground.
- Economics. If you can refine a million tons of steel for pennies a ton, you'll put most ground-based facilities out of business, but you'll be competing against other people doing the same thing in space. Your space technology has to be good enough - mostly cheap enough - that when the price drops precipitously you don't go bankrupt.
- Weapons. If you can bring a rock into orbit you can drop it onto Earth. Space is referred to by military people as 'the ultimate high ground.' A few guys with an asteroid mover can take out a city with an ease currently available only to national governments. They could also do this by accident. I imagine that there'll be a zone a few million miles across, around the Earth, which you can't bring asteroids into, but a lot of people will still find this worrying.
- The statement has been made, 'governments won't get us into space because there's no government in space.' It looks as though private industry will do this, if governments provide encouragement and stay out of the way, but the treaty which proclaimed that space was the common heritage of all mankind was, until recently, considered to be a problem. Anything which can be interpreted to mean that there are no property rights is going to impede progress, even if it was idealistic posturing rather than an attempt to think ahead. This isn't going to be a one-time problem - governments don't think ahead or absorb new ideas.
Will we do this? I hope so. It's a very appealing idea. I imagine the next step will be a test vehicle which captures an asteroid a foot across, and a mission which sets up a large parabolic mirror and melts it. After that we can make a much bigger mirror in space, which Stine points out is easy. Then we can get the material back to Earth.
I don't think this can be entirely automated, experimental procedures being what they are. Once we have a stronger presence in space, probably we'll have ion-drive ships, autonomous, powered by nuclear reactors which can go to the asteroid belt and bring back mass, which people will refine in orbit. But that's just speculation.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 10:36 PM on September 21, 2021 [7 favorites]
Rosinante also makes a point that most people aren't ready to hear yet: once you're out in space, the concept of scarce resources becomes meaningless. We're limited by being at the bottom of a very deep gravity well. Once you're out of that, you can go where you want, and the resources you need are waiting to be picked up.
I don't think 16 Psyche is special. There are over a million asteroids more than a mile long, and probably billions of smaller ones. The techniques detailed in G. Harry Stine's The Third Industrial Revolution can be used to refine them. Saturn's rings contain a volume of 99.9% pure water equal to about about 75% of what we have on Earth, and they're not the only other body of water in the solar system.
This, of course, makes a lot of SF and TV shows ridiculous. A common plot is that a group of honest, hardworking miners are threatened by bandits trying to steal the gold they've dug out of an asteroid. Gold is scarce and valuable here on Earth. In space that's unlikely to be the case, and Rosinante plays with this idea.
On Earth you have access to the surface, and you can easily dig down hundreds of feet.
Asteroids come in all sizes, and they just have to be smelted or refined. If you have to dig into one, it's probably easier to find one small enough to melt and refine.
It's difficult to comprehend just how much matter is out there. It's quite possible, depending on the process used, that small asteroids will be more valuable than big ones because they don't have to be cut up to be processed.
Psyche is maybe the core of a planet. The asteroid belt is maybe a planet that didn't condense into a ball. Asteroids are mostly either nickel-iron or carbon, both of which will likely be valuable in space. You can also ship them back to Earth and save refining metals in the ecosphere, but when people move out into space some will stay there, and a lot of your market will be out of the atmosphere.
Why haven't we done this yet?
- We're making great strides in space. This doesn't mean we're ready to gram an asteroid, even one passing Earth closely. We need a presence in orbit, so we don't have to ship everything up, dash after an asteroid, and then quickly refine it and land it.
- We don't really have a handle on the negative effects of radiation and of zero-G.
- We have no idea how to set up a self-contained ecosystem. I suspect that the smaller your ship, the more difficult it is to keep your ecology stable. You can't stay in space long if you have to ship your food and air up. I don't know what the minimum viable size is, but I suspect a fairly large rotating ring structure - say 1000 feet in diameter - would be a good start while we learn the subtleties. I believe this can be done, but there'll be a learning curve.
- A source of fuel off-Earth will make things vastly easier.
- Processing facilities in space are pretty much essential. You're going to have a much easier time landing manufactured goods and refined metals than crashing thousands of tons of steel into the ground.
- Economics. If you can refine a million tons of steel for pennies a ton, you'll put most ground-based facilities out of business, but you'll be competing against other people doing the same thing in space. Your space technology has to be good enough - mostly cheap enough - that when the price drops precipitously you don't go bankrupt.
- Weapons. If you can bring a rock into orbit you can drop it onto Earth. Space is referred to by military people as 'the ultimate high ground.' A few guys with an asteroid mover can take out a city with an ease currently available only to national governments. They could also do this by accident. I imagine that there'll be a zone a few million miles across, around the Earth, which you can't bring asteroids into, but a lot of people will still find this worrying.
- The statement has been made, 'governments won't get us into space because there's no government in space.' It looks as though private industry will do this, if governments provide encouragement and stay out of the way, but the treaty which proclaimed that space was the common heritage of all mankind was, until recently, considered to be a problem. Anything which can be interpreted to mean that there are no property rights is going to impede progress, even if it was idealistic posturing rather than an attempt to think ahead. This isn't going to be a one-time problem - governments don't think ahead or absorb new ideas.
Will we do this? I hope so. It's a very appealing idea. I imagine the next step will be a test vehicle which captures an asteroid a foot across, and a mission which sets up a large parabolic mirror and melts it. After that we can make a much bigger mirror in space, which Stine points out is easy. Then we can get the material back to Earth.
I don't think this can be entirely automated, experimental procedures being what they are. Once we have a stronger presence in space, probably we'll have ion-drive ships, autonomous, powered by nuclear reactors which can go to the asteroid belt and bring back mass, which people will refine in orbit. But that's just speculation.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 10:36 PM on September 21, 2021 [7 favorites]
According to your link, Psyche 16 is ten to twenty times the diameter of the Chixulub asteroid which exterminated the dinosaurs, which means that it is at least a thousand to 8 thousand times as massive, not to mention that the Chixulub asteroid was a carbonaceous chondrite and about 1/3 to 1/2 the density of Psyche 16.
If we lost control of that thing on the way in, it would be sheer luck if all it did was extinguish multicellular life on Earth.
That seems like a significant downside to me.
posted by jamjam at 10:38 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
If we lost control of that thing on the way in, it would be sheer luck if all it did was extinguish multicellular life on Earth.
That seems like a significant downside to me.
posted by jamjam at 10:38 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: Just to clarify I’m interested in the engineering and technology issues that would currently block us from grabbing it. Whether it should be done is a different question.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:02 PM on September 21, 2021
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:02 PM on September 21, 2021
We completely lack any of the infrastructure necessary to do this mission. We have world War 1 era aircraft available to us in the spaceship sense, and need at least a Concord. We have great potential to get to space, but look how expensive it is to launch anything at all right now.
Just looking at weight and fuel, how much would it cost to get machinery to do any space mining to the moon? In a LaGrange point? And what would that technology even look like? Both the machinery to lift so much material out of the gravity well and the mining machinery itself. None of this technology exists or is proven yet.
If we needed to fly a spaceship to an asteroid that contained a cure for, say, Elon Musk's brain cancer, we can probably do this. But creating industry in space is a whole nother level of adventure akin to building intercontinental railroads. What governments have the political will or desire to create another Apollo program? Delta IV Heavy, the rocket that lifted NASA's current project, Orion was built in 2004. I know that's almost 20 years ago, but is also a good measuring stick for how far we've come. The next goal of the Orion project is to orbit the moon. There's a lot of buzz about billionaire amateur astronauts and rocket builders, and hopefully there will be good stuff from that, but look at the current state of the art of those projects as well.
We have no heavy industry rockets really, we have no space stations, we have no robot asteroid miners that can stand vacuum. We have no particularly easy way of getting materials down to the surface, and no facilities to store them in space yet. Do we have a lot of the basic building blocks to achieve space mining? Yes. Could all the billionaires band together and create an Apollo program? Yes. Can the United States government spend half its military budget and accomplish it? Yes. But realistically government space exploration is largely focused on smaller scale projects at the moment, and I don't see that changing. Somebody might come along and create a miracle out of the pieces we have, but this just doesn't feel like a 20-year project to me. A 50-year project sounds optimistic as well. Perhaps 100, if we make it that long.
So yeah cost benefit analysis multiplied by the difficulties of actually creating the tech, multiplied by the gravity well multiplied by the political situation worldwide, multiplied by the space billionaires all doing their own thing multiplied by the catastrophic potential for failure.
posted by Jacen at 4:49 AM on September 22, 2021
Just looking at weight and fuel, how much would it cost to get machinery to do any space mining to the moon? In a LaGrange point? And what would that technology even look like? Both the machinery to lift so much material out of the gravity well and the mining machinery itself. None of this technology exists or is proven yet.
If we needed to fly a spaceship to an asteroid that contained a cure for, say, Elon Musk's brain cancer, we can probably do this. But creating industry in space is a whole nother level of adventure akin to building intercontinental railroads. What governments have the political will or desire to create another Apollo program? Delta IV Heavy, the rocket that lifted NASA's current project, Orion was built in 2004. I know that's almost 20 years ago, but is also a good measuring stick for how far we've come. The next goal of the Orion project is to orbit the moon. There's a lot of buzz about billionaire amateur astronauts and rocket builders, and hopefully there will be good stuff from that, but look at the current state of the art of those projects as well.
We have no heavy industry rockets really, we have no space stations, we have no robot asteroid miners that can stand vacuum. We have no particularly easy way of getting materials down to the surface, and no facilities to store them in space yet. Do we have a lot of the basic building blocks to achieve space mining? Yes. Could all the billionaires band together and create an Apollo program? Yes. Can the United States government spend half its military budget and accomplish it? Yes. But realistically government space exploration is largely focused on smaller scale projects at the moment, and I don't see that changing. Somebody might come along and create a miracle out of the pieces we have, but this just doesn't feel like a 20-year project to me. A 50-year project sounds optimistic as well. Perhaps 100, if we make it that long.
So yeah cost benefit analysis multiplied by the difficulties of actually creating the tech, multiplied by the gravity well multiplied by the political situation worldwide, multiplied by the space billionaires all doing their own thing multiplied by the catastrophic potential for failure.
posted by Jacen at 4:49 AM on September 22, 2021
Best answer: Just to clarify I’m interested in the engineering and technology issues that would currently block us from grabbing it.
I'm an engineer in space/defense. Off the top of my head, here are some major technological issues that would need to be solved before something like this is attempted:
1) Fault-tolerant, long-duration, remote space missions. We've done this with Voyager, but that was a fairly simple probe launched decades ago. We'd need to develop new technology that could withstand the rigors of space for additional decades from now with modern communications and control systems. Most of our satellites aren't even designed for the time frames we're talking about. Plus, if you think about risk management, there has to be essentially zero chance of failure of this mission or else you've bankrupted probably multiple countries.
2) Landing multiple, large vehicles on an asteroid. We only recently managed to get a probe on an asteroid - a year, two years ago? To go from that to conceivably multiple tons of hardware at several different, closely packed locations is outside of our current state of the art. See also point 1), where we also need to figure out how to protect landing vehicles from the blast and debris of the other landing vehicles trying to park near them.
3) Ship-to-ship refueling in space. Never been done before (ok, we resupply the ISS, but that's a little different). What fuels are we using? How can we both safely transport them (ignoring the obscene cost of putting them in space to begin with) and then move them between vehicles? If your rocket movers need to be refueled while attached to this asteroid, how is that going to be accomplished?
4) Actually moving an asteroid. How do you coordinate multiple rocket movers to provide a thrust vector perfectly through the center of mass of a potato-shaped object without sending it spinning wildly out of control or simply breaking up from all the internal stresses? What surveys of the asteroid need to be done to ensure it's stable enough to move? How do you develop a rocket motor that can provide variable thrust (most current designs don't do this!), turn themselves on and off again (again, most don't!), and have the brains to communicate with the other movers to come up with a control solution?
These are not insurmountable problems, but would keep a lot of people gainfully employed for an extremely long time.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:30 AM on September 22, 2021 [7 favorites]
I'm an engineer in space/defense. Off the top of my head, here are some major technological issues that would need to be solved before something like this is attempted:
1) Fault-tolerant, long-duration, remote space missions. We've done this with Voyager, but that was a fairly simple probe launched decades ago. We'd need to develop new technology that could withstand the rigors of space for additional decades from now with modern communications and control systems. Most of our satellites aren't even designed for the time frames we're talking about. Plus, if you think about risk management, there has to be essentially zero chance of failure of this mission or else you've bankrupted probably multiple countries.
2) Landing multiple, large vehicles on an asteroid. We only recently managed to get a probe on an asteroid - a year, two years ago? To go from that to conceivably multiple tons of hardware at several different, closely packed locations is outside of our current state of the art. See also point 1), where we also need to figure out how to protect landing vehicles from the blast and debris of the other landing vehicles trying to park near them.
3) Ship-to-ship refueling in space. Never been done before (ok, we resupply the ISS, but that's a little different). What fuels are we using? How can we both safely transport them (ignoring the obscene cost of putting them in space to begin with) and then move them between vehicles? If your rocket movers need to be refueled while attached to this asteroid, how is that going to be accomplished?
4) Actually moving an asteroid. How do you coordinate multiple rocket movers to provide a thrust vector perfectly through the center of mass of a potato-shaped object without sending it spinning wildly out of control or simply breaking up from all the internal stresses? What surveys of the asteroid need to be done to ensure it's stable enough to move? How do you develop a rocket motor that can provide variable thrust (most current designs don't do this!), turn themselves on and off again (again, most don't!), and have the brains to communicate with the other movers to come up with a control solution?
These are not insurmountable problems, but would keep a lot of people gainfully employed for an extremely long time.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:30 AM on September 22, 2021 [7 favorites]
So this asteroid is similar in makeup to our planet's core. Guess what? Our planet's core is a lot closer! Of course, it's a huge engineering challenge to drill that deep and it could cause all kinds of devastating unintended consequences. There's a lot of iron and nickel that's a lot easier to get to. (Sound familiar?)
posted by rikschell at 5:55 AM on September 22, 2021
posted by rikschell at 5:55 AM on September 22, 2021
Best answer: This is a fun question! I'm going to ignore the socio-economic implications and focus on fuel.
Moving an object from the asteroid belt to Earth orbit would require about 10,500 m/s of delta-V. That is, you have to change its velocity by 10.5 kilometers per second.
To push 16 Psyche, let's use robots to deliver a bunch (e.g., trillions upon trillions) of Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines. That's what the Space Shuttle used as its main engine, and it has an exhaust velocity of 4.4 km/s in a vacuum.
This means that for every kilogram of 16 Psyche we want to move, we need to use about 11 kilograms of hydrogen/oxygen propellant. (That's assuming perfect efficiency, and that there would be a good place to put all those engines on the surface of 16 Psyche, which there isn't.)
Now, 16 Psyche weighs about 2.7 x 10^19 kg. So moving it to Earth orbit in this scenario will require nearly 3 x 10^20 kg of propellant.
On Earth, we can get that hydrogen / oxygen to use as propellant by separating water via electrolysis. But we have to send that propellant to 16 Psyche.
The biggest challenge with moving heavy stuff in space is that you also have to launch the propellant to move the payload, then add more propellant to move that propellant, and the burden grows exponentially ("the tyranny of the rocket equation").
For every tonne of propellant we send from Earth to the asteroid belt, we'll have to use at least 100 additional tonnes just to get that propellant into space and ferry it to 16 Psyche.
Which puts our total propellant requirements at 3 x 10^22 kg.
That's a fundamental problem. All of the water on Earth only weighs about 1.4 x 10^21 kg.
The amount of fuel we would need to move 16 Psyche is roughly twenty times the mass of all the water on Earth.
So even if you turned every single molecule of water on Earth into rocket fuel, you wouldn't get close to moving 16 Psyche to our orbit.
posted by mcbaya at 6:17 AM on September 22, 2021 [10 favorites]
Moving an object from the asteroid belt to Earth orbit would require about 10,500 m/s of delta-V. That is, you have to change its velocity by 10.5 kilometers per second.
To push 16 Psyche, let's use robots to deliver a bunch (e.g., trillions upon trillions) of Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines. That's what the Space Shuttle used as its main engine, and it has an exhaust velocity of 4.4 km/s in a vacuum.
This means that for every kilogram of 16 Psyche we want to move, we need to use about 11 kilograms of hydrogen/oxygen propellant. (That's assuming perfect efficiency, and that there would be a good place to put all those engines on the surface of 16 Psyche, which there isn't.)
Now, 16 Psyche weighs about 2.7 x 10^19 kg. So moving it to Earth orbit in this scenario will require nearly 3 x 10^20 kg of propellant.
On Earth, we can get that hydrogen / oxygen to use as propellant by separating water via electrolysis. But we have to send that propellant to 16 Psyche.
The biggest challenge with moving heavy stuff in space is that you also have to launch the propellant to move the payload, then add more propellant to move that propellant, and the burden grows exponentially ("the tyranny of the rocket equation").
For every tonne of propellant we send from Earth to the asteroid belt, we'll have to use at least 100 additional tonnes just to get that propellant into space and ferry it to 16 Psyche.
Which puts our total propellant requirements at 3 x 10^22 kg.
That's a fundamental problem. All of the water on Earth only weighs about 1.4 x 10^21 kg.
The amount of fuel we would need to move 16 Psyche is roughly twenty times the mass of all the water on Earth.
So even if you turned every single molecule of water on Earth into rocket fuel, you wouldn't get close to moving 16 Psyche to our orbit.
posted by mcbaya at 6:17 AM on September 22, 2021 [10 favorites]
Sorry, random thoughts:
Most of our efforts right now involve just getting ships into orbit and back down. There is no interplanetary infrastructure. And even if there was, the only way to feasibly move a massive asteroid might be some self-replicating device which multiplies itself out of raw materials in the asteroid belt, then works in concert -- like the drone arms in Lexx, which end up converting the entire universe…into drone arms.
Nickel and iron aren't that rare. If the asteroid was gold, then it might be worth it. So what if the value drops? Gold these days is much more useful in electronics, etc. than as coins and jewelry. Just being able to give flute students an affordable solid gold flute would be amazing.
In any case, Earth still has a crap-load of buried minerals that are easier to get to than anything in space. That's why China is now Afghanistan's new best friend: they can build the infrastructure to extract all those rare-earth metals.
posted by jabah at 7:13 AM on September 22, 2021
Most of our efforts right now involve just getting ships into orbit and back down. There is no interplanetary infrastructure. And even if there was, the only way to feasibly move a massive asteroid might be some self-replicating device which multiplies itself out of raw materials in the asteroid belt, then works in concert -- like the drone arms in Lexx, which end up converting the entire universe…into drone arms.
Nickel and iron aren't that rare. If the asteroid was gold, then it might be worth it. So what if the value drops? Gold these days is much more useful in electronics, etc. than as coins and jewelry. Just being able to give flute students an affordable solid gold flute would be amazing.
In any case, Earth still has a crap-load of buried minerals that are easier to get to than anything in space. That's why China is now Afghanistan's new best friend: they can build the infrastructure to extract all those rare-earth metals.
posted by jabah at 7:13 AM on September 22, 2021
Use an autonomous robot to save on fragile human ecosystem. I wonder how we'd tackle:
*smelting and fractional separation of asteroid material
*storing volatiles to create reaction mass
*building and rebuilding the robot to refine the asteroid material
Those are challenges I'm interested in taking on. Maybe we can do a proof of concept recycling junk in the microgravity orbiting earth, then send the mining and processing robot to work in the asteroid belt. Whether you'd bother to send matter into Earth's gravity well depends on if we're still fighting over resources, but having a base outside Mars that can slingshot Jupiter to go and refine matter orbiting other stars seems a good way to spread Solar ideas out into the galaxy, even if they're not Earther or Human alone.
posted by k3ninho at 8:23 AM on September 22, 2021
*smelting and fractional separation of asteroid material
*storing volatiles to create reaction mass
*building and rebuilding the robot to refine the asteroid material
Those are challenges I'm interested in taking on. Maybe we can do a proof of concept recycling junk in the microgravity orbiting earth, then send the mining and processing robot to work in the asteroid belt. Whether you'd bother to send matter into Earth's gravity well depends on if we're still fighting over resources, but having a base outside Mars that can slingshot Jupiter to go and refine matter orbiting other stars seems a good way to spread Solar ideas out into the galaxy, even if they're not Earther or Human alone.
posted by k3ninho at 8:23 AM on September 22, 2021
In addition to the mechanical and aerospace engineering challenges, there are also financial engineering, regulatory engineering, and tax engineering challenges.
Assuming we know how to achieve the physical portions of the problem: which jurisdictions on earth have regulatory control? What does the company’s tax bill look like if they claim they now control trillions of dollars of assets? How do you even monetize such an asset without simply collapsing the relevant markets?
One potential solution is to monetize asteroid retrieval via blackmail. Develop the infrastructure to capture and control such an asteroid, and offer that you be paid to _not_ do it. This way you still get paid well, you have no extraordinary tax fights, and you look like a fairly normal corporation. In return, the people of Earth avoid both the physical risks and the global destabilization associated with the capture of such an asteroid.
posted by whisk(e)y neat at 1:17 PM on September 22, 2021
Assuming we know how to achieve the physical portions of the problem: which jurisdictions on earth have regulatory control? What does the company’s tax bill look like if they claim they now control trillions of dollars of assets? How do you even monetize such an asset without simply collapsing the relevant markets?
One potential solution is to monetize asteroid retrieval via blackmail. Develop the infrastructure to capture and control such an asteroid, and offer that you be paid to _not_ do it. This way you still get paid well, you have no extraordinary tax fights, and you look like a fairly normal corporation. In return, the people of Earth avoid both the physical risks and the global destabilization associated with the capture of such an asteroid.
posted by whisk(e)y neat at 1:17 PM on September 22, 2021
Response by poster: In addition to the mechanical and aerospace engineering challenges, there are also financial engineering, regulatory engineering, and tax engineering challenges.
Considering that it looks like Project Orion would be necessary to bring it in I suspect the violation of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty would be the first hurdle.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:30 PM on September 22, 2021
Considering that it looks like Project Orion would be necessary to bring it in I suspect the violation of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty would be the first hurdle.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:30 PM on September 22, 2021
This resource branches out into a solar-system sized rabbit-hole beyond 16 psyche, nonetheless I think it's worth pointing you in the direction of some few thousand words on the subject at Atomic Rockets
posted by protorp at 1:32 PM on September 22, 2021
posted by protorp at 1:32 PM on September 22, 2021
« Older What's a good piano workbook for an adult whose... | What's a good vacuum cleaner for vacuum sealing... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
Hmm, I wonder what the insurance premiums would be for that. The foreseeable damages (disruption of moon cycles) could be rather substantial.
Speaking only for myself, I find this kind of idea repulsive. Why the fuck is every thing considered game for exploitation? Isn't there a range of necessary social justice concerns that need fixing before some mega squillionaire applies for an asteroid mining licence? Who would get the royalties? And seriously, what would be the fucking point? To prove we can or catastrophically can't? Let's reuse, reduce, recycle first before we go mining freakin asteroids.
posted by Thella at 9:59 PM on September 21, 2021 [13 favorites]