AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission(arstechnica.com)
arstechnica.com
AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/astroforge-selects-target-for-high-risk-seat-of-the-pants-asteroid-mission/
83 comments
Size estimates are really really hard to be clear. But we do have additional data that says this should be a little bit larger. That all being said, were gonna find out this year!
I've met this team, been to their office and done a deep dive on what they are doing. They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company.
I do wonder why they chose Stoke Space as their launch provider given the founders come from SpaceX and Falcon rockets have a track record.
My first though is that investors are playing some game with investment going to revenues of another portfolio company. How common is this?
Overlapping Investors:
- 776
- Y Combinator
- Initialized Capital
- Caladan Ventures
I do wonder why they chose Stoke Space as their launch provider given the founders come from SpaceX and Falcon rockets have a track record.
My first though is that investors are playing some game with investment going to revenues of another portfolio company. How common is this?
Overlapping Investors:
- 776
- Y Combinator
- Initialized Capital
- Caladan Ventures
Is asteroid mining profitable? I'm assuming you would smelt in space and then use the metal in space, although reentry could be cheap if you form it into a lifting body for re-entry and are willing to lose some from ablation as it glides in.
So you have to get your miner and smelter and power plant into stable orbit at like $1m/ton, and then what? Does the money work out?
So you have to get your miner and smelter and power plant into stable orbit at like $1m/ton, and then what? Does the money work out?
I have directly worked with one of these companies on asteroid discovery. Even they would say it does not cash out for decades. But the premise is that as costs improve it becomes fabulously lucrative.
These companies are very, very risky. If they weren’t, you would see more competition!
These companies are very, very risky. If they weren’t, you would see more competition!
> These companies are very, very risky. If they weren’t, you would see more competition!
I figure the odds for these companies, and others engaging in medium-future tech, being 99% loss 1% profit that effectively rounds to "all the money".
It's numbers that effectively break conventional risk reward calculations and are going to require more patience then many investors possess.
I figure the odds for these companies, and others engaging in medium-future tech, being 99% loss 1% profit that effectively rounds to "all the money".
It's numbers that effectively break conventional risk reward calculations and are going to require more patience then many investors possess.
I assume the point of mining in space is to have raw resources that are already outside the gravity well. Not so much for bringing it to earth, but space based construction.
Good point, but the assumptions are that this metal would then be used in potentially life critical systems and would require the full rigor of quality assessments for such materials. Not too sure how that might work in LEO.
The physics don't work to bring this stuff back to LEO. We’ve got to use the atmosphere to slow us down.
How are you planning to do that in future missions? Sending up a a capsule or heat shield for sample return, or is the ultimate goal to return a larger mass and lose some?
Pre-built sample return has been proven to work with another asteroid in a small way I guess, the Hayabusa mission.
Pre-built sample return has been proven to work with another asteroid in a small way I guess, the Hayabusa mission.
well, nothing is really ever lost
That's an interesting research area!
They are going after platinum group metals, which are valuable enough that the cost of reentry is irrelevant assuming they can get a somewhat pure sample in space.
We have a refinery that dose exactly this. It's the main IP of the company.
While the total amount of platinum-group metals in asteroids is many times greater than what is accessible at the Earth surface, because on Earth these metals have gone down, into the Earth's core, they are much more difficult to extract on asteroids than on Earth.
At the surface of Earth, the platinum-group metals are concentrated into metallic nuggets or metallic sulfide crystals, which are very different in density and chemical properties from the surrounding minerals, so they can be separated relatively simply.
On asteroids, these metals are present mostly as minute impurities in iron-nickel-cobalt alloys (i.e. around one part per million). Separating them mechanically is impossible and chemical separation requires great amounts of chemical reactants, e.g. of a strong acid, that would also be very difficult to produce on asteroids, which are depleted in volatile elements. Perhaps one could do some kind of distillation of liquid metals or a differential sublimation in vacuum, which would require a huge amount of energy and a lot of special equipment able to work at very high temperatures. Bringing back the PGE-containing iron alloy is impossible, as its weight is about one million times greater.
At this time there exists no technology that could be used for the extraction of platinum-group metals on asteroids. Developing such a technology is possible, but it is something much more difficult than making a spaceship going to an asteroid and back.
Any credible company that claims that they want to mine asteroids would have to first demonstrate on Earth how to extract the valuable chemical elements from the minerals that can be found on asteroids, and only then solve the simple task of transportation to the asteroids.
There are some celestial bodies where the platinum-group metals are found in forms that are easier to separate from the surrounding minerals, i.e. in the sources of the so-called chondrite meteorites, which are very small bodies that have never coalesced into big asteroids. There the minerals remain as they have condensed at the formation of the Solar System, without having ever been remelted. There much of the platinum-group metals may be in the form of microscopic refractory inclusions in the big mass of common minerals, e.g. inside the so-called calcium-aluminum rich inclusions, instead of being dissolved in iron.
While a survey mission could find such small bodies with a chondrite-like composition, the amount of valuable metals in each such body is very small (a few grams per ton) and the energy consumed with moving from a small body to another would be very large in comparison with the amount of extracted metals.
Moreover, no operations would be possible on such small bodies, the spaceship would have to contain inside the complete metal extraction facility.
What should be easy to make on asteroids is only high-quality iron or nickel or cobalt alloys, for building structures in space, not on Earth.
At the surface of Earth, the platinum-group metals are concentrated into metallic nuggets or metallic sulfide crystals, which are very different in density and chemical properties from the surrounding minerals, so they can be separated relatively simply.
On asteroids, these metals are present mostly as minute impurities in iron-nickel-cobalt alloys (i.e. around one part per million). Separating them mechanically is impossible and chemical separation requires great amounts of chemical reactants, e.g. of a strong acid, that would also be very difficult to produce on asteroids, which are depleted in volatile elements. Perhaps one could do some kind of distillation of liquid metals or a differential sublimation in vacuum, which would require a huge amount of energy and a lot of special equipment able to work at very high temperatures. Bringing back the PGE-containing iron alloy is impossible, as its weight is about one million times greater.
At this time there exists no technology that could be used for the extraction of platinum-group metals on asteroids. Developing such a technology is possible, but it is something much more difficult than making a spaceship going to an asteroid and back.
Any credible company that claims that they want to mine asteroids would have to first demonstrate on Earth how to extract the valuable chemical elements from the minerals that can be found on asteroids, and only then solve the simple task of transportation to the asteroids.
There are some celestial bodies where the platinum-group metals are found in forms that are easier to separate from the surrounding minerals, i.e. in the sources of the so-called chondrite meteorites, which are very small bodies that have never coalesced into big asteroids. There the minerals remain as they have condensed at the formation of the Solar System, without having ever been remelted. There much of the platinum-group metals may be in the form of microscopic refractory inclusions in the big mass of common minerals, e.g. inside the so-called calcium-aluminum rich inclusions, instead of being dissolved in iron.
While a survey mission could find such small bodies with a chondrite-like composition, the amount of valuable metals in each such body is very small (a few grams per ton) and the energy consumed with moving from a small body to another would be very large in comparison with the amount of extracted metals.
Moreover, no operations would be possible on such small bodies, the spaceship would have to contain inside the complete metal extraction facility.
What should be easy to make on asteroids is only high-quality iron or nickel or cobalt alloys, for building structures in space, not on Earth.
> ...which would require a huge amount of energy...
Think of an umbrella, and imagine something like it, only much bigger.
Like the girder-mast of a crane, optionally unfolding like a telescoping boom by means of scissors mechanism.
Maybe with some 'tensegrity' sprinkled on.
Spokes along its length folding out.
Some very thin, highly reflective foil stretched tight over these.
Shaped into a parabolic mirror.
Producing one fucking hot focal point, like a looking glass in the sun.
Embiggen or multiply as needed, necessitated by distance from the sun.
>...would have to first demonstrate on Earth...
Why would that be? There is gravity and atmosphere here, which can't be applied in the same ways 'up there', and probably wouldn't make sense to, anyways.
Think different!
Think of an umbrella, and imagine something like it, only much bigger.
Like the girder-mast of a crane, optionally unfolding like a telescoping boom by means of scissors mechanism.
Maybe with some 'tensegrity' sprinkled on.
Spokes along its length folding out.
Some very thin, highly reflective foil stretched tight over these.
Shaped into a parabolic mirror.
Producing one fucking hot focal point, like a looking glass in the sun.
Embiggen or multiply as needed, necessitated by distance from the sun.
>...would have to first demonstrate on Earth...
Why would that be? There is gravity and atmosphere here, which can't be applied in the same ways 'up there', and probably wouldn't make sense to, anyways.
Think different!
There is no ablation at 400°C to 800°C, which can be achieved by forming the 'lifting body' more into the direction of larger wingspans, instead of making it falling fast like a brick. Which hasn't been done so far, because larger wingspans are impractical for rocket lift from earth, but that doesn't apply here.
We refine it (or better yet, enrich it) in space and bring it back to Earth. I wish someone would buy it in space, but currently, that market is worth... 0.
So, we ship that shit back to Earth and sell it into the commodities market.
So, we ship that shit back to Earth and sell it into the commodities market.
>Is asteroid mining profitable? I'm assuming you would smelt in space and then use the metal in space
are there middlemen in this market, or is it a vertically integrated "smelt it/dealt it" situation?
are there middlemen in this market, or is it a vertically integrated "smelt it/dealt it" situation?
> They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company.
To whom? Who is interested in buying the minuscule amounts of material you could realistically bring back to earth from an asteroid? What raw material would be expensive enough to warrant the gigantic amounts of fuel needed to transport even a few tens of kilos of back?
To whom? Who is interested in buying the minuscule amounts of material you could realistically bring back to earth from an asteroid? What raw material would be expensive enough to warrant the gigantic amounts of fuel needed to transport even a few tens of kilos of back?
The usually cited mineral is iridium. It is exceptionally rare on earth (ninth rarest stable element!) but abundant in asteroids and very useful in alloys and many applications.
Abundant in asteroids means that it is dissolved in solid iron at slightly more than 1 gram per ton of iron.
It is obvious that you cannot bring back to Earth a thousand tons of iron with the purpose of extracting from it a kilogram of iridium worth only a few thousand $.
Good luck for the extraction in the conditions at the surface of an asteroid of the kilogram of iridium that can be obtained by processing a thousand tons of hard iron alloy.
That would need a really huge amount of energy and processing methods that do not exist yet.
The average concentration of platinum-group metals in the Earth's crust may be lower by more than a thousand times in comparison with asteroids, but here these metals are not dispersed uniformly but they are concentrated in places where their concentration is similar or better than in asteroids.
Moreover in these mining places the platinum-group metals are present as metallic nuggets or as sulfide minerals, which are much heavier and with different chemical properties than the surrounding minerals. Therefore they can be separated cheaply.
Even so, the platinum-group metals are still only seldom separated directly, but usually they are obtained as by-product of extracting other metals, like nickel or copper, because they are more concentrated in the waste products than in the original ore.
At this stage, while the cost of transportation to and from an asteroid can be estimated with a reasonable uncertainty, absolutely nobody is able to estimate the cost in energy and chemical substances for the extraction of plantinum-group metals or of any other valuable elements while on the surface of an asteroid.
Until someone demonstrates on Earth a feasible extraction method, determining thus the amount of energy and of various chemical substances that do not exist on the target asteroid, which are necessary per mass of recovered valuable chemical elements, any commercial company that claims to have the purpose of mining asteroids can only be a scam for investors, because nobody knows if such an activity can become profitable before a remote future, e.g. one hundred years from now, when none of the present investors would remain alive.
I am pretty certain that some time in a not distant future the mining of asteroids will happen, but it will be mostly for substances easy to extract and easy to use in space, like steel for building structures outside Earth, not for bringing anything back to Earth.
It is obvious that you cannot bring back to Earth a thousand tons of iron with the purpose of extracting from it a kilogram of iridium worth only a few thousand $.
Good luck for the extraction in the conditions at the surface of an asteroid of the kilogram of iridium that can be obtained by processing a thousand tons of hard iron alloy.
That would need a really huge amount of energy and processing methods that do not exist yet.
The average concentration of platinum-group metals in the Earth's crust may be lower by more than a thousand times in comparison with asteroids, but here these metals are not dispersed uniformly but they are concentrated in places where their concentration is similar or better than in asteroids.
Moreover in these mining places the platinum-group metals are present as metallic nuggets or as sulfide minerals, which are much heavier and with different chemical properties than the surrounding minerals. Therefore they can be separated cheaply.
Even so, the platinum-group metals are still only seldom separated directly, but usually they are obtained as by-product of extracting other metals, like nickel or copper, because they are more concentrated in the waste products than in the original ore.
At this stage, while the cost of transportation to and from an asteroid can be estimated with a reasonable uncertainty, absolutely nobody is able to estimate the cost in energy and chemical substances for the extraction of plantinum-group metals or of any other valuable elements while on the surface of an asteroid.
Until someone demonstrates on Earth a feasible extraction method, determining thus the amount of energy and of various chemical substances that do not exist on the target asteroid, which are necessary per mass of recovered valuable chemical elements, any commercial company that claims to have the purpose of mining asteroids can only be a scam for investors, because nobody knows if such an activity can become profitable before a remote future, e.g. one hundred years from now, when none of the present investors would remain alive.
I am pretty certain that some time in a not distant future the mining of asteroids will happen, but it will be mostly for substances easy to extract and easy to use in space, like steel for building structures outside Earth, not for bringing anything back to Earth.
I have over 8.5B in binding contracts.
Good luck to you, then. I truly hope you succeed!
Bringing it back is a lot more energy efficient than getting up there in the first place.
As far as I know, launching on new, unproven rockets tends to be a lot cheaper. E.g. the Escapade mission launching on New Glenn.
Do they have a plan for reentry?
Or is the idea to sell the ore or processed material in space?
(Because when it comes to asteroid mining, I think that's the hard part. If they have believable plans here I might consider applying to work for them, but I haven't seen anything that passes the smell test on this.)
Or is the idea to sell the ore or processed material in space?
(Because when it comes to asteroid mining, I think that's the hard part. If they have believable plans here I might consider applying to work for them, but I haven't seen anything that passes the smell test on this.)
Couldn’t you make an ablative heat shield possibly from waste materials on the same asteroid? Then lob your metal toward a shallow sea on earth?
Or take it back to some stable earth orbit then pick it up there?
Do we know what their reentry plan is?
Or take it back to some stable earth orbit then pick it up there?
Do we know what their reentry plan is?
I am not super comfortable with a company whose purpose is figuring out pinpoint meteor strikes.
That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?
That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?
Iron rods from heaven is a fun idea, but it's very unlikely to be a practical weapon. It's not hard to change the orbit (and thus the landing spot) of an object in space that is small enough for us to control. And no country will allow any other country to store weapons in orbit, as soon as someone put one there, it would get blown out of the sky.
The reason we have ICBMs is that we can store them safely on the ground, and launch them on an unpredictable trajectory, with minutes of travel time to their destination, preferably launched in a swarm that makes them even harder to track and individually stop.
The reason we have ICBMs is that we can store them safely on the ground, and launch them on an unpredictable trajectory, with minutes of travel time to their destination, preferably launched in a swarm that makes them even harder to track and individually stop.
I get asked this all the time. And in short — no way in hell we can change the orbit of an asteroid that is large enough to make a massive impact. Cool (I guess) to think about, but physics make this impossible for our size craft.
Hmm…see also The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
If you have the energy to mine in space, you have a massive kinetic energy well to “throw rocks” into.
If you have the energy to mine in space, you have a massive kinetic energy well to “throw rocks” into.
The positions and velocities of every human ship in space are well known and easy to track. And any journey from space to Earth takes a long time. And anything that a single rocket that went out for mining (or even a dozen or a hundred rockets) could move back towards earth as a weapon can easily be moved slightly to hit a different destination using other weapons.
So if anyone tried to send rockets to fling back pieces of asteroid or of the Moon as weapons to Earth will be easily observed, tracked, and countered. And anyway, we're very far off being able to send a chunk of rock towards Earth that wouldnt entirely burn up in the atmosphere, nevermind one that could level a city.
So if anyone tried to send rockets to fling back pieces of asteroid or of the Moon as weapons to Earth will be easily observed, tracked, and countered. And anyway, we're very far off being able to send a chunk of rock towards Earth that wouldnt entirely burn up in the atmosphere, nevermind one that could level a city.
> And anything that a single rocket that went out for mining (or even a dozen or a hundred rockets) could move back towards earth as a weapon can easily be moved slightly to hit a different destination using other weapons.
There's a lot of complexity here you're ignoring. You can nudge a rock into a collision course with Earth using a slow ion thruster, but you're not going to stop it with one. Time is not on your side, you need to get your affecter to the rock, during which the rock will be getting closer and (assuming it came from the asteroid belt) faster, both of which make the required impulse higher. Higher impulse means more mass and/or propellant, which means even more time and cost!
This is not a symmetrical problem, but defense rarely is. The fact we can shoot bullets at supersonic speeds doesn't make it any easier to stop them.
There's a lot of complexity here you're ignoring. You can nudge a rock into a collision course with Earth using a slow ion thruster, but you're not going to stop it with one. Time is not on your side, you need to get your affecter to the rock, during which the rock will be getting closer and (assuming it came from the asteroid belt) faster, both of which make the required impulse higher. Higher impulse means more mass and/or propellant, which means even more time and cost!
This is not a symmetrical problem, but defense rarely is. The fact we can shoot bullets at supersonic speeds doesn't make it any easier to stop them.
We absolutely can't, with current technology, move an asteroid of any dangerous size towards (or away from) a collision with the Earth - and even more so not with a single engine that has to have fuel for the entire duration of the flight. It would take thousands of years to get an ion engine on an asteroid to move it back to the Earth, and you'd have to constantly send fuel with it. And controlling where it will land is an entirely different problem.
And many years of the engine running would still be easily reverted by one or two high energy impacts, like a fusion bomb hitting the asteroid just right.
Consider this as well from an energy diff perspective - to hit a city with the same energy as a nuclear bomb, you have to have the final mass times the final speed squared about equal to the energy of the fusion bomb. And to get that, you have to put in energy that's proportional to the mass before burning up in the atmosphere times the square of the delta of the speed difference between its original speed and its speed on a collision course with the Earth. So you need to find an asteroid that's pretty close to hitting the Earth, and still put in the energy to move its full mass the extra distance.
You're right this is not fully a symmetrical problem, but it's asymmetrical in the opposite direction: defense is a lot easier than offense in this case, simply because of the massive inertia of the weapon. To alter your metaphor of the bullets, there's a reason why we shoot explosive rockets instead of just hurling huge rocks at our enemies. And it's precisely the same reason why a nuclear weapon is much better than an asteroid.
And many years of the engine running would still be easily reverted by one or two high energy impacts, like a fusion bomb hitting the asteroid just right.
Consider this as well from an energy diff perspective - to hit a city with the same energy as a nuclear bomb, you have to have the final mass times the final speed squared about equal to the energy of the fusion bomb. And to get that, you have to put in energy that's proportional to the mass before burning up in the atmosphere times the square of the delta of the speed difference between its original speed and its speed on a collision course with the Earth. So you need to find an asteroid that's pretty close to hitting the Earth, and still put in the energy to move its full mass the extra distance.
You're right this is not fully a symmetrical problem, but it's asymmetrical in the opposite direction: defense is a lot easier than offense in this case, simply because of the massive inertia of the weapon. To alter your metaphor of the bullets, there's a reason why we shoot explosive rockets instead of just hurling huge rocks at our enemies. And it's precisely the same reason why a nuclear weapon is much better than an asteroid.
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Why would you? Space weapons are also very definitively illegal. I don't see what you could accomplish this way that a nuke couldn't, and it's not like there's a shortage of nuclear firepower. Plus, this seems really slow to deploy.
> I don't see what you could accomplish this way that a nuke couldn't
The nuke poisons the land, a metallic asteroid just makes a conventional mess you cleanup and rebuild under your own flag...
The nuke poisons the land, a metallic asteroid just makes a conventional mess you cleanup and rebuild under your own flag...
You realize that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are huge, inhabited cities, and have been without interruption, right?
Elevated rates of leukemia and other cancers don't prevent cities from existing or even thriving...
Even if that's true, it still means that there is at best a tiny advantage to an asteroid weapon compared to a nuclear weapon - and a gigantic disadvantage in terms of energy cost of moving an asteroid from its orbit to Earth's surface, and in terms of the months or years it would take to deploy (in which time your enemy might even find a way to stop you, or at least launch all of its nuclear arsenal on you if that's not possible, MAD style).
That’s already possible but not that interesting as a weapon except for pinpoint strikes.
Clearly they would need permission as for any landing.
Clearly they would need permission as for any landing.
That would just be a shittier, illegal version of the oreshnik system
Clearly you would need permission from the government who owned the sea, in which case it would not be illegal.
Capsules land with shaped ablative heat shields all the time so it seems proven but the hard part would be making one off earth.
Maybe they’ll just send a small capsule up though and return the metals with that.
Capsules land with shaped ablative heat shields all the time so it seems proven but the hard part would be making one off earth.
Maybe they’ll just send a small capsule up though and return the metals with that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty I was referring to military application
Existing system https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pYKDNSYw1NQ
Existing system https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pYKDNSYw1NQ
I don’t know if that is what is happening here, but it is a common occurrence — both to juice numbers but also for special pricing (as mentioned in article) or mutual flexibility (dedicated launch), because the founders know each other, etc.
Honestly, this had nothing to do with mutual investors. While that's great, the space community is small, and we all talk to each other. Andy and Stoke Space are an amazing team, and in this case, we shared a lot of benefits with each other. It's a rare win/win.
Portfolio company synergies is totally normal and a practice that Elon himself leans on
verY Common…
Massive props to the founders for having the stones to even enter this space. I couldn't imagine the difficulties and setbacks these guys will encounter. But I think humans figuring out how to effectively mine stuff outside of our planet will be one of the great leaps forward for humanity and will likely become a proficient industry in our lifetimes.
I think it's sad that our entire economy is designed around infinite growth to such a degree that we can say with a straight face astroid mining is the way to go. We have everything we need, it's power that is the problem and always has been.
>We have everything we need
Speak for yourself. If this company reduces the price of iridium, makes PET and CT scanners cheaper, helps more people get scans, and ultinately results in more cases of cancer and heart disease identified sooner and people leading healthier lives, then I need this company.
Speak for yourself. If this company reduces the price of iridium, makes PET and CT scanners cheaper, helps more people get scans, and ultinately results in more cases of cancer and heart disease identified sooner and people leading healthier lives, then I need this company.
There is absolutely no chance for this company to reduce the price of iridium before you die.
For now, even the cost per kilogram of a payload launched in an Earth orbit is greater than the price of iridium.
The cost of the energy for the round-trip to an asteroid per kilogram of brought back substance would be much greater.
Even this transportation cost would be dwarfed by the cost of the energy and of the chemical reactants needed to extract on the surface of an asteroid one kilogram of iridium from a thousand tons of ore, which would normally consist of iron-nickel-cobalt alloy, which is very hard to process, either mechanically or thermally.
For now, even the cost per kilogram of a payload launched in an Earth orbit is greater than the price of iridium.
The cost of the energy for the round-trip to an asteroid per kilogram of brought back substance would be much greater.
Even this transportation cost would be dwarfed by the cost of the energy and of the chemical reactants needed to extract on the surface of an asteroid one kilogram of iridium from a thousand tons of ore, which would normally consist of iron-nickel-cobalt alloy, which is very hard to process, either mechanically or thermally.
We are running out of critical metals. Regardless of whether it's us (AstroForge) or someone else, this has to happen, and it has to happen a lot sooner than we realize.
We are only running out of critical metals because all industries are accustomed to design only how to make a product that they can sell from raw materials, expecting that it will be dumped as garbage in the future.
All manufacturers should have been forced already decades ago to slowly transition to designing for any product both how to make it from raw materials and how to extract all those raw materials, with only a few exceptions (e.g. the volatile non-metals, which enter biological cycles anyway), from the product at its end of life.
The transition should have been very slow, e.g. by imposing initially very low recovery efficiencies, e.g. well under 50%, but then raising slowly the mandatory efficiencies.
Nobody should have been allowed to manufacture and sell any products unless either the same company is able to completely recycle the product, or another company takes this responsibility for that product.
Such laws should have already been adopted long ago and then there would have been no risk of running out of critical metals.
In my opinion, the metal that is most critical today is indium, which is extremely rare but it is required, even if in minute quantities, in a lot of essential applications, like in all computer, TV or smartphone displays, in LED lighting, in GaN power supplies and in many others where no good substitutes exist.
All manufacturers should have been forced already decades ago to slowly transition to designing for any product both how to make it from raw materials and how to extract all those raw materials, with only a few exceptions (e.g. the volatile non-metals, which enter biological cycles anyway), from the product at its end of life.
The transition should have been very slow, e.g. by imposing initially very low recovery efficiencies, e.g. well under 50%, but then raising slowly the mandatory efficiencies.
Nobody should have been allowed to manufacture and sell any products unless either the same company is able to completely recycle the product, or another company takes this responsibility for that product.
Such laws should have already been adopted long ago and then there would have been no risk of running out of critical metals.
In my opinion, the metal that is most critical today is indium, which is extremely rare but it is required, even if in minute quantities, in a lot of essential applications, like in all computer, TV or smartphone displays, in LED lighting, in GaN power supplies and in many others where no good substitutes exist.
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Running out of metals like "we can't build critical infrastructure and spoons are like diamonds" or running out of metals like Apple might lose a billion next quarter? Running out of metals in what context?
I live like a pauper so this is all beyond me tbh. I can't square any solution that doesn't begin with not having billionaires.
I live like a pauper so this is all beyond me tbh. I can't square any solution that doesn't begin with not having billionaires.
We're running out of critical metals at the price point we want to mine them. There are more that will become viable when the price goes up.
Thanks — this shit is definitely hard mode. But we're 3 weeks away from sending the first private spaceship to deep space, and we're doing it for orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else before us.
Fingers crossed it works.
Fingers crossed it works.
I wish you every success. You're doing what 10 year old me in the 1980s dreamed of.
I still daydream about bootstrapping in solar orbit. My amateur idea was to focus the sun onto rocks with huge mirrors at first, lasers later. Then using a handwaving/centrifugal force to separate out the elements lol. Though I wasn't smart enough to figure out what was needed to build a factory via a bunch of robots.
Sorry for the rambling!
I still daydream about bootstrapping in solar orbit. My amateur idea was to focus the sun onto rocks with huge mirrors at first, lasers later. Then using a handwaving/centrifugal force to separate out the elements lol. Though I wasn't smart enough to figure out what was needed to build a factory via a bunch of robots.
Sorry for the rambling!
So much of the conversation is about profit and economic viability of landing raw materials on Earth under current market conditions... While I don't begrudge that, I think the true game changer for orbital mining is how greater material availability can open brand new frontiers, in other words, make the pie larger, not just compete and change the balance of the existing pie.
I long for arcologies, orbital elevators, orbital habitats. Things that only become truly possible with automated manufacturing and a plunging of energy and material costs by orders of magnitude.
Space is way more difficult and expensive than people like to believe. While I wholly support the waste of venture capital and other dumb money for space things, I don't expect the company to come close to returning anything from an asteroid.
You will never meet a hater doing more than you.
The surface of the Earth is an economically hard market for space mining; sure there is demand there, but there is already the most competitive supply in the solar system. It's no so clear that precious metals would be precious if you got more of them, see the short story that is titled the same as this book. [1]
I have notebooks but no publications on an analysis of the problem of setting up a factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that would make large plastic and aluminum solar sails that would fly back on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point to block sunlight and mitigate climate change. I pointed to this [2] as an example of the kind of construction, but it was pointed out to me that IKAROS didn't survive that long. Something interesting about the sunshade concept though is that a high performance sunshade is actually heavier and less reflective than the ideal solar sail because a heavier and darker sail sits in a more favorable geometry to block sunlight. Maybe more material could mean more durable. I had a very clear mental picture of how to make PET plastic but not so much the Kapton which used to make space blankets and stuff. Drexler and O'Neills other students envisioned using vapor-phase techniques to make big structures in space, but didn't address the manufacturing of biaxially stretched plastics like Mylar and Kapton that are likely solar sail materials. You probably have some machine that makes long strips of plastic that get welded or otherwise stuck together by robots, I have some idea of what that large scale 'assembler' looks like.
I was taking a class in geoengineering and was struck about how the problem involved technologies related to clean energy and carbon capture, for instance asteroids probably contain something which could best be described as "coal" and an obvious path to turning them into what we think of as "petrochemicals" would go through a machine like [3]. You get waste CO2 from the chemistry which you're going to recycle because it's precious [4]. One problem I was worried about was that an asteroid like that probably contains a lot of trapped gas which you'd want to remove before you do anything else because you don't want to waste it and it might even be dangerous. You probably send a factory which builds a factory and you will sure need storage tanks, there will be enough iron to make similar tanks to the ones we use on Earth, but the storage tank factory won't be online before you need to degas.
You could ship spools of tape with microcontrollers stuck on them and other complex objects from Earth but if you really want flexibility you want something that can fabricate small arbitrary complex objects, which is what led Drexler to his "assembler" idea which unfortunately hasn't materialized. There's a tough decision between: do you send people (who need a habitat and might not come back) who can fix things that break and deal with exceptional events or do you build a replica factory in cislunar space where a crew can do experiments and handle exceptional events by remote control (with a 40 min delay sometimes) or can you build a really autonomous controller?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS
[3] https://www.dakotagas.com/
[4] though Martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the same atmosphere they use as a CO2 source
I have notebooks but no publications on an analysis of the problem of setting up a factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that would make large plastic and aluminum solar sails that would fly back on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point to block sunlight and mitigate climate change. I pointed to this [2] as an example of the kind of construction, but it was pointed out to me that IKAROS didn't survive that long. Something interesting about the sunshade concept though is that a high performance sunshade is actually heavier and less reflective than the ideal solar sail because a heavier and darker sail sits in a more favorable geometry to block sunlight. Maybe more material could mean more durable. I had a very clear mental picture of how to make PET plastic but not so much the Kapton which used to make space blankets and stuff. Drexler and O'Neills other students envisioned using vapor-phase techniques to make big structures in space, but didn't address the manufacturing of biaxially stretched plastics like Mylar and Kapton that are likely solar sail materials. You probably have some machine that makes long strips of plastic that get welded or otherwise stuck together by robots, I have some idea of what that large scale 'assembler' looks like.
I was taking a class in geoengineering and was struck about how the problem involved technologies related to clean energy and carbon capture, for instance asteroids probably contain something which could best be described as "coal" and an obvious path to turning them into what we think of as "petrochemicals" would go through a machine like [3]. You get waste CO2 from the chemistry which you're going to recycle because it's precious [4]. One problem I was worried about was that an asteroid like that probably contains a lot of trapped gas which you'd want to remove before you do anything else because you don't want to waste it and it might even be dangerous. You probably send a factory which builds a factory and you will sure need storage tanks, there will be enough iron to make similar tanks to the ones we use on Earth, but the storage tank factory won't be online before you need to degas.
You could ship spools of tape with microcontrollers stuck on them and other complex objects from Earth but if you really want flexibility you want something that can fabricate small arbitrary complex objects, which is what led Drexler to his "assembler" idea which unfortunately hasn't materialized. There's a tough decision between: do you send people (who need a habitat and might not come back) who can fix things that break and deal with exceptional events or do you build a replica factory in cislunar space where a crew can do experiments and handle exceptional events by remote control (with a 40 min delay sometimes) or can you build a really autonomous controller?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS
[3] https://www.dakotagas.com/
[4] though Martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the same atmosphere they use as a CO2 source
[flagged]
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are a lot of new space startups that operate this way, trying to replicate SpaceX's success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
SpaceX also came really close to failure. High risk strategies always look better after they have already paid off.
Have you heard of Astra...
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That's how the original successful space program, the Soviet one, worked. Test-driven development is traditional in the space launch space.
Rapid iteration and testing is the preferred approach if you have a highly integrated, tightly-coupled organization.
If you use contractors, on the other hand, everything needs to be planned out and stipulated in advance to protect the parties involved.
Rapid iteration and testing is the preferred approach if you have a highly integrated, tightly-coupled organization.
If you use contractors, on the other hand, everything needs to be planned out and stipulated in advance to protect the parties involved.
The soviet space program stalled on N-1 because this approach (*integrated* move-fast-break-things testing) turned out to be unviable once there are too many failure points. And the engineers were well aware of that and proposed to do static fire tests, but that was not in the budget.
It fell apart a bit after Korolev died.
Every successful program is test-driven.
Past mentions of AstroForge: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...