Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'(daniel-suarez.com)
daniel-suarez.com
Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
http://daniel-suarez.com/deltav_design.html
91 comments
I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining
Daemon and Freedom are top class hard scifi. The plot hinges on technical detail that is both completely plausible and a natural extension of existing information technology. It's obvious that Suarez really understands what he's talking about in a deep way. I'd say "Daemon" is top twenty for best hard scifi books. http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt
Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.
Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.
I found the books enjoyable, they're good techno thrillers and page turners like the Ramez Naam ones or Crichton's books but I think putting them into the top 20 is a little bit too much. Just taking a look at your list, Butler and Lem and Ted Chiang are on a different level.
I've recently been re-reading Daemon, and I find that it's very dated to the Windows XP era. As for Freedom(TM), I think it goes too far with its extrapolations from then-current technology. To name just one example, speech recognition and human-sounding speech synthesis were nowhere near as good as they were portrayed in that book.
Funny you should bring up "Daemon", I just tried to read it. If anything, I found the writing focussed too much on accurate details at the expense of good storytelling. As the plot was no secret, and the concept fairly trivial, I gave up pretty quickly.
Just read it off your recommendation here. It's not a hard scifi unless you'd think Transformers also are. Some really far fetched sysadmin fiction.
Suarez used to be a tech/security consultant... the title is a direct reference to system daemons :)
I appreciated the science that went into Delta-V but I just couldn't enjoy the book itself. Random things happening that provide continual doses of danger and excitement I can deal with. But main characters making engineering decisions that seem designed to provide that less so. And secondary characters whose only motivation I could figure out was to keep up that same danger and excitement just ended up making the book unenjoyable for me.
Which engineering decisions do you think were made in service of the plot?
This Amazon review doesn't seem too promising, and there were few others that echoed the same sentiment.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07FLX8V84/R1CKDTZCNU5E6...
How do you feel about the non-tech parts of the novel? Does it get soapboxy or cartoony, or does it hold a sensible tone?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07FLX8V84/R1CKDTZCNU5E6...
How do you feel about the non-tech parts of the novel? Does it get soapboxy or cartoony, or does it hold a sensible tone?
I found it very definitely a light read. It's a fun romp into 'what if we did asteroid mining like right now'. Characters are fleshed out enough to tell that story, I didn't find anything preachy or cartoonish, and I didn't spot any idiot-balls or other fake-danger tropes of SciFi.
In same-same-but-different, I recommend "Walkaway" (Cory Doctorow) and "Nexus" (Rameez Nam).
I'll take these as unsolicited strong recommendations for my next sci-fi novel reading, as I'm just finishing the Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy. Thank you!
influx was really good!
One of my favorite recent hard sci fi novels. The science and engineering were all real, plausible, and the story was fun too.
Not a single radiator on that thing.
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Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?
I guess it depends on what your goal is. If it's just to bring back high-value metals to Earth, then that's probably the least complicated because the mass you have to move is low. I don't know the logistics of, say, gold mining in space, but you might not even bother with any on-site processing. Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That presupposes you know how to find such a rock.
If your goal is to setup manufacturing in space, then that's far more complicated. You'd be working with massive amounts of low-value metals and refining them into aluminum, or steel, or whatever it is you need the most of right now, and then turning the metal into usable parts for habitats or ships or mining equipment. (Whatever is too bulky to be cost effective to ship from Earth.) Again, I don't know enough about metal refining processes to make much of a guess what the logistics would entail, but I can predict it'll need a lot of intermediate products and chemicals which might or might not be available on-site, and it would consume an enormous amount of energy. That could be from solar (though the asteroid belt is quite a bit farther from the sun than we're at) or nuclear.
Nuclear generally doesn't work well in space because there's not usually any good way to get rid of excess heat, but conducting the heat to a large asteroid could work pretty well. So then you'd just have the usual barrier that putting a reactor is space will require a launch from Earth, and that makes everyone rightly nervous.
If your goal is to setup manufacturing in space, then that's far more complicated. You'd be working with massive amounts of low-value metals and refining them into aluminum, or steel, or whatever it is you need the most of right now, and then turning the metal into usable parts for habitats or ships or mining equipment. (Whatever is too bulky to be cost effective to ship from Earth.) Again, I don't know enough about metal refining processes to make much of a guess what the logistics would entail, but I can predict it'll need a lot of intermediate products and chemicals which might or might not be available on-site, and it would consume an enormous amount of energy. That could be from solar (though the asteroid belt is quite a bit farther from the sun than we're at) or nuclear.
Nuclear generally doesn't work well in space because there's not usually any good way to get rid of excess heat, but conducting the heat to a large asteroid could work pretty well. So then you'd just have the usual barrier that putting a reactor is space will require a launch from Earth, and that makes everyone rightly nervous.
> Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back.
That's not how it works.
Simply put, most small asteroids are undifferentiated. Meaning, they all have roughly similar mix of materials that depend mostly on the distance to the sun of where they formed. Unlike on earth, since they formed they have never been molten or been subject to erosion and transport by weather and water, which concentrates like materials together. Most asteroids are basically balls of dust where any grain is pretty much in the place where it landed when it first hit the ball.
The upside of this is that gold (and similar heavy metals) is much more abundant in asteroids than it is in the earth's crust, because when the whole earth was molten, all of our native gold ended up deep in the core. The gold we do have on earth is mostly what has rained down in meteors since the earth's crust has been solid. If they were on earth, each and every asteroid would be made of an exceptionally rich gold ore. However, add the cost of moving all of it back, and even with implausibly good rockets, it's just not worth it.
The feasible options are either:
1. Refine in situ. Develop some process of separating all that gold (and other valuable materials that are much more abundant in asteroids than on earth) from the less valuable materials, and then just send the gold back. The fact that we are talking about dealing with a ball of barely-compacted dust makes this in some ways easier, in others harder.
2. Find one of the much rarer differentiated chunks of rock and metal instead. They have much higher concentrations of the stuff you want, and are in many ways much more convenient to deal with, given how they actually have a hard surface and all. The biggest problem with them is that they are generally going to be very big. As in, less rocks floating in space and more minor planets. The most promising candidate for this is 16 Psyche, which is believed to be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet that got smashed apart by a very energetic collision. It probably has more gold than all of earth's crust, and it probably exists as an uniform solid gold layer.
The problem with 16 Psyche is that you are not moving it anywhere. It's >250km across and masses more than 2 quadrillion tonnes. So you have to dig into it. And, the layers above the gold layer are made of solid nickel-iron. So you either hope that there is a crack into the deep layers formed when the protoplanet was busted apart, and use that, or you somehow tunnel through a hundred kilometers of iron.
That's not how it works.
Simply put, most small asteroids are undifferentiated. Meaning, they all have roughly similar mix of materials that depend mostly on the distance to the sun of where they formed. Unlike on earth, since they formed they have never been molten or been subject to erosion and transport by weather and water, which concentrates like materials together. Most asteroids are basically balls of dust where any grain is pretty much in the place where it landed when it first hit the ball.
The upside of this is that gold (and similar heavy metals) is much more abundant in asteroids than it is in the earth's crust, because when the whole earth was molten, all of our native gold ended up deep in the core. The gold we do have on earth is mostly what has rained down in meteors since the earth's crust has been solid. If they were on earth, each and every asteroid would be made of an exceptionally rich gold ore. However, add the cost of moving all of it back, and even with implausibly good rockets, it's just not worth it.
The feasible options are either:
1. Refine in situ. Develop some process of separating all that gold (and other valuable materials that are much more abundant in asteroids than on earth) from the less valuable materials, and then just send the gold back. The fact that we are talking about dealing with a ball of barely-compacted dust makes this in some ways easier, in others harder.
2. Find one of the much rarer differentiated chunks of rock and metal instead. They have much higher concentrations of the stuff you want, and are in many ways much more convenient to deal with, given how they actually have a hard surface and all. The biggest problem with them is that they are generally going to be very big. As in, less rocks floating in space and more minor planets. The most promising candidate for this is 16 Psyche, which is believed to be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet that got smashed apart by a very energetic collision. It probably has more gold than all of earth's crust, and it probably exists as an uniform solid gold layer.
The problem with 16 Psyche is that you are not moving it anywhere. It's >250km across and masses more than 2 quadrillion tonnes. So you have to dig into it. And, the layers above the gold layer are made of solid nickel-iron. So you either hope that there is a crack into the deep layers formed when the protoplanet was busted apart, and use that, or you somehow tunnel through a hundred kilometers of iron.
Probably we're only going to be mining small Earth crossing asteroid that are close to Earth intercept in delta-v terms to start with.
Have you seen the reports on the new data coming out of the mission orbiting Bennu a few days ago? It's looking like small asteroids might be a bit less undifferentiated than we thought those the story isn't changing by that much.
https://www.space.com/asteroid-bennu-formation-history-osiri...
Have you seen the reports on the new data coming out of the mission orbiting Bennu a few days ago? It's looking like small asteroids might be a bit less undifferentiated than we thought those the story isn't changing by that much.
https://www.space.com/asteroid-bennu-formation-history-osiri...
Another problem with bringing big rocks back from space, is that you’d probably have a bunch of people trying to stop you either with words or force. Big rocks coming to earth could mean the end of life on earth with the smallest of mistakes or accidents.
Depends on how big the rocks are. The Tunguska event (not an end-all-life level of catastrophe but definitely not something we'd want to repeat on accident) is thought to have been caused by something that was about 100 meters or so [1]. Compared to light-weight spacecraft that's a lot more mass than we're accustomed to moving with the technology currently available. Also, the destructiveness of that event may have had a lot to do with the relative velocity of it with the Earth, which would presumably be a lot lower if you were just trying to aim a metal-rich boulder or bundle of processed metal into a parking orbit with Earth.
It would be reasonable to expect some level of concern from the governments of Earth that even relatively small metallic objects could be used as effective weapons if lobbed at specific cities or military installations. Perhaps heavy manufacturing will for that and other reasons be kept away from Earth orbit and instead be done in, say, lunar orbit or in one of the Earth-sun Lagrangian points where the gravity well isn't so deep and it's easier to move the product anywhere else in the solar system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
It would be reasonable to expect some level of concern from the governments of Earth that even relatively small metallic objects could be used as effective weapons if lobbed at specific cities or military installations. Perhaps heavy manufacturing will for that and other reasons be kept away from Earth orbit and instead be done in, say, lunar orbit or in one of the Earth-sun Lagrangian points where the gravity well isn't so deep and it's easier to move the product anywhere else in the solar system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
16 Psyche is the sort of place I was picturing as a source of gold. I didn't know we knew enough about its structure to say that the gold (if present) would be difficult to get at, but that sounds like an interesting problem.
In retrospect I guess it makes sense that if 16 Psyche is a chunk of planetary core, then the sort of impact that created it would likely have turned it molten, and its internal weak gravity may then have caused all the heavy metals to sink to the middle before it cools.
At any rate, gold mining sounds like an easier problem than, say, trying to manufacture stainless steel in space in a way that makes economic sense. (We'll probably get there eventually if we're going to have any kind of real space economy, but bootstrapping is going to be hard.)
In retrospect I guess it makes sense that if 16 Psyche is a chunk of planetary core, then the sort of impact that created it would likely have turned it molten, and its internal weak gravity may then have caused all the heavy metals to sink to the middle before it cools.
At any rate, gold mining sounds like an easier problem than, say, trying to manufacture stainless steel in space in a way that makes economic sense. (We'll probably get there eventually if we're going to have any kind of real space economy, but bootstrapping is going to be hard.)
The process chain necessary to turn rock into a single useful metal is colossal, and has been since antiquity.
The effort required to set such a chain up, in space, for not one, but for dozens of metals (modern manufacturing requires many of them), as well as other chemicals (many of whom are inputs into other processes) would be astronomical.
And then you would actually need to do something useful with that metal.
If you're not refining and using what you mined in orbit, and are bringing it back to Earth, it's cheaper to just mine what you're looking for on Earth. We have no shortage of mineral deposits that are considered economically non-viable today - but are still far easier and cheaper to extract than anything in space.
The effort required to set such a chain up, in space, for not one, but for dozens of metals (modern manufacturing requires many of them), as well as other chemicals (many of whom are inputs into other processes) would be astronomical.
And then you would actually need to do something useful with that metal.
If you're not refining and using what you mined in orbit, and are bringing it back to Earth, it's cheaper to just mine what you're looking for on Earth. We have no shortage of mineral deposits that are considered economically non-viable today - but are still far easier and cheaper to extract than anything in space.
Yes and no, the problem is the initial infrastructure. Travel to and from the earth's surface are your actual major cost. (And to be honest, as we all know, the downward leg is almost free; so just the travel up the gravity well to low earth orbit is your actual bottleneck) .
If there was already a town/colony on the moon, they'd attract the entire current space industry, because it's simply cheaper to launch things into earth orbit from the moon.
Specifically from the moon, you can probably upgrade your launch options and get launch costs low enough to compete with earth-surface to earth-surface shipping, in some cases.
People somehow mis-estimate delta-v costs. Take a look at the Saturn-V for an intuition. Pretty much the majority of that towering machine was needed to get people to LEO + first leg to the moon (and most of it was fuel), but only the 2 tiny space-ships at the top were needed to get people back.
If there was already a town/colony on the moon, they'd attract the entire current space industry, because it's simply cheaper to launch things into earth orbit from the moon.
Specifically from the moon, you can probably upgrade your launch options and get launch costs low enough to compete with earth-surface to earth-surface shipping, in some cases.
People somehow mis-estimate delta-v costs. Take a look at the Saturn-V for an intuition. Pretty much the majority of that towering machine was needed to get people to LEO + first leg to the moon (and most of it was fuel), but only the 2 tiny space-ships at the top were needed to get people back.
As I understand it, there iron and nickel asteroids that aren't chemically combined with other substances like ore is on Earth. So perhaps the only processing required would be melting and reforming it.
A kilogram of iron currently costs ~40 cents. That's because iron makes up 6% of the earth's crust.
A kilogram of nickel costs ~13$. And nickel makes up a mere 0.0009% of the earth's crust.
It's completely pointless to mine them, with the hope of returning them to Earth. It's also completely pointless to mine them, with the hope of using them in space, for many, many reasons.
1. A spacecraft factory employs thousands of people, and requires hundreds of millions of cubic feet of space.
2. The supply chains that feed a spacecraft factory employ hundreds of thousands of people, and require billions of cubic feet of space.
3. They also require a long tail end of chemical inputs that are not iron and nickel.
The difference between 'We have a space factory that is fed by an asteroid miner and builds more spacecraft/space factories' and 'We have a proof of concept where we spent a billion dollars to mine and refine 20 grams of iron, which we fed to a 3d-metal printer (Never mind all the other consumable inputs into it), to print a little figurine of a rocket' is rather large... And only the latter is achievable in my lifetime.
A kilogram of nickel costs ~13$. And nickel makes up a mere 0.0009% of the earth's crust.
It's completely pointless to mine them, with the hope of returning them to Earth. It's also completely pointless to mine them, with the hope of using them in space, for many, many reasons.
1. A spacecraft factory employs thousands of people, and requires hundreds of millions of cubic feet of space.
2. The supply chains that feed a spacecraft factory employ hundreds of thousands of people, and require billions of cubic feet of space.
3. They also require a long tail end of chemical inputs that are not iron and nickel.
The difference between 'We have a space factory that is fed by an asteroid miner and builds more spacecraft/space factories' and 'We have a proof of concept where we spent a billion dollars to mine and refine 20 grams of iron, which we fed to a 3d-metal printer (Never mind all the other consumable inputs into it), to print a little figurine of a rocket' is rather large... And only the latter is achievable in my lifetime.
If you're making a space-space spacecraft, you can probably cut the requirements for that vehicle factory down to a manageable size. Still big! But manageable. And some of the lightweight specialty parts (like computers) could still be imported from earth, further reducing the size.
I'm not saying it won't still be big. You basically need community in Low earth orbit, low lunar orbit, or on the moon. But it could well be worth it; depending on the demand for hardware in earth orbit to begin with.
If you get moon launch costs low enough (and they'd be low!) you might start competing with some traditional industries on earth.
I'm not saying it won't still be big. You basically need community in Low earth orbit, low lunar orbit, or on the moon. But it could well be worth it; depending on the demand for hardware in earth orbit to begin with.
If you get moon launch costs low enough (and they'd be low!) you might start competing with some traditional industries on earth.
Iron and nickel are too abundant on Earth, so their transport from elsewhere cannot be profitable. They and other abundant elements can be mined only for building structures on those asteroids or in space.
The metals that are much more abundant on asteroids than on Earth will be dissolved in the Fe-Ni-Co metal in concentrations varying between 2 ppm for the most abundant (ruthenium) down to 0.05 ppm for the least abundant (rhenium).
While these very low concentrations are still thousands of times larger than the average concentrations on Earth, mining them on asteroids would still require processing thousands of tons of Fe-Ni-Co metal for a few kilograms of precious metals.
On asteroids that have never been melted, the processing could be easier, because most of the precious metals might be present in very small refractory grains dispersed between the grains of Fe-Ni-Co metal and silicate minerals and maybe a cheaper separation method could be found than for the case when they are in solution.
However, the same huge quantities of material need to be processed.
Right now, it is quite certain that this cannot be profitable.
Some time, in a more distant future, we can imagine a technology much more advanced than what we have now, which would enable sending some robots able to perform completely automatically the tasks of building from local materials some huge installations for energy collection, for mining and for extracting the desired elements, so that asteroid mining would require the transport in both directions, between Earth and the mined asteroid, of only very small quantities of materials and equipment.
Even if this is much beyond our current capabilities, it might become a necessity if we would exhaust the exploitable reserves for some of the least abundant elements, dispersing them in junk from which their extraction could become too costly.
On the other hand, there are numerous research projects now trying to replace the use of less abundant elements with the use of more abundant elements, in a lot of applications.
In most cases, it is likely that such substitution attempts are likely to succeed much earlier than the time when we would be able to mine those elements from outside the Earth.
The metals that are much more abundant on asteroids than on Earth will be dissolved in the Fe-Ni-Co metal in concentrations varying between 2 ppm for the most abundant (ruthenium) down to 0.05 ppm for the least abundant (rhenium).
While these very low concentrations are still thousands of times larger than the average concentrations on Earth, mining them on asteroids would still require processing thousands of tons of Fe-Ni-Co metal for a few kilograms of precious metals.
On asteroids that have never been melted, the processing could be easier, because most of the precious metals might be present in very small refractory grains dispersed between the grains of Fe-Ni-Co metal and silicate minerals and maybe a cheaper separation method could be found than for the case when they are in solution.
However, the same huge quantities of material need to be processed.
Right now, it is quite certain that this cannot be profitable.
Some time, in a more distant future, we can imagine a technology much more advanced than what we have now, which would enable sending some robots able to perform completely automatically the tasks of building from local materials some huge installations for energy collection, for mining and for extracting the desired elements, so that asteroid mining would require the transport in both directions, between Earth and the mined asteroid, of only very small quantities of materials and equipment.
Even if this is much beyond our current capabilities, it might become a necessity if we would exhaust the exploitable reserves for some of the least abundant elements, dispersing them in junk from which their extraction could become too costly.
On the other hand, there are numerous research projects now trying to replace the use of less abundant elements with the use of more abundant elements, in a lot of applications.
In most cases, it is likely that such substitution attempts are likely to succeed much earlier than the time when we would be able to mine those elements from outside the Earth.
Casey Handmer has a great blog taking hard analysis of what activities will be practical in space. He argues there is no real reason for asteroid mining to bring resources back to earth. So the challenge is to identify a large market for resources to be used in space.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-k...
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-k...
So, the current price to bring something from space to Earth is for a capsule that keeps the material in a comfortable Earth-like atmosphere with minimal heating and g forces on the way down the way humans like it. If you instead have an object that doesn't need to breath and doesn't mind pulling 1000s of gs then things are much simpler, just take a reasonably sized sphere of your platinum ore, wrap it in some cheaper ablatable material, and drop it onto a desert then take it out of the small crater. Which isn't to say I actually think that asteroid mining for use on Earth is viable, just that the numbers used in that article are way too pessimistic.
In the short orbital communication is a >$100 billion a year industry and people are already looking at ways to manufacture larger antennas than can fit in rocket fairings in space for better signals. Even modest amounts of metal from an asteroid would be very valuable in orbit there since your competing with material that has to be brought up from Earth. Even bags of loose regolith could be very useful as radiation and meteorite protection.
In the short orbital communication is a >$100 billion a year industry and people are already looking at ways to manufacture larger antennas than can fit in rocket fairings in space for better signals. Even modest amounts of metal from an asteroid would be very valuable in orbit there since your competing with material that has to be brought up from Earth. Even bags of loose regolith could be very useful as radiation and meteorite protection.
Why not shaping it into some sort of lifting body, made out of honey comb like structures, and have that land into the ocean near the coast, to be towed to the next factory complex on land and disassamble the refined raw materials there? Combine with maybe inner compartments for standardized space containers for whatever else? This could be completely passive and autonomous, where the attached engine modules for deorbitng could detach and climb back up to some parking orbit or space dock before reentry happens. By choosing the right dimensions of that lifting body(surface to weight) you could avoid much of the reentry heat, down to about 400°C.
I was just talking about the minimal viable product. Yeah, metal foam is something you can make in space but not on Earth and it might be valuable to send metal down for that reason. Using a glider will increase uncertainty about where the results end up, though, compared to a simpler measure of decent. I think accepting some ablation as the price of accuracy is probably the way to go.
Depends on if you put some control software on the glider. Generally a controllable aerodynamic shape gives you a good amount of cross-range ability to pick your landing ground, and a good amount of accuracy to land there with precision.
Honestly I don't think this would be a really big problem.
But to be absolutely sure nothing bad can ever happen(TM):
Why not have purpose built catching planes match up with them, once they are low and slow enough? I imagine something Airbus A380 sized, or large Antonovs, C5 Galaxy, releasing a clamp or hook on a cable or boom, connecting to that glider in the air. And tow it to its designated splash down area.
Like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_retrieval
There! Solved that for you :)
But to be absolutely sure nothing bad can ever happen(TM):
Why not have purpose built catching planes match up with them, once they are low and slow enough? I imagine something Airbus A380 sized, or large Antonovs, C5 Galaxy, releasing a clamp or hook on a cable or boom, connecting to that glider in the air. And tow it to its designated splash down area.
Like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_retrieval
There! Solved that for you :)
In some sense we have done it (taken a sample, returned to earth). The question is, would it be valuable to do so at scale?
If we had a good reason to mine an asteroid, knew we could get to said asteroid, and the asteroid has a composition we predicted. It’s probably possible to mine it to some extent.
However, in terms of economics... today, we haven’t proven we can mine an asteroid in a meaningful way.
Assuming we could, why? It would be cheaper at this point to just send up stuff from earth. If we prove our the mining tech, then it becomes cheaper to replicate, then it becomes more economical. However, first we need a use case that precludes an earth resupply (to force the major investment of tech). I suspect this will happen when we mine some super rare substance that is never found on earth (and/or we are curious about what’s deep inside an asteroid)
If we had a good reason to mine an asteroid, knew we could get to said asteroid, and the asteroid has a composition we predicted. It’s probably possible to mine it to some extent.
However, in terms of economics... today, we haven’t proven we can mine an asteroid in a meaningful way.
Assuming we could, why? It would be cheaper at this point to just send up stuff from earth. If we prove our the mining tech, then it becomes cheaper to replicate, then it becomes more economical. However, first we need a use case that precludes an earth resupply (to force the major investment of tech). I suspect this will happen when we mine some super rare substance that is never found on earth (and/or we are curious about what’s deep inside an asteroid)
It’s probably just a coincidence, but I find it interesting that one of Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla) has a huge demand for nickel and another one of Elon Musk’s companies (SpaceX) won a contract with NASA to explore 16 Psyche, an asteroid essentially made of nickel, and is working on a completely reusable rocket...
I was just thinking about posting a comment about 16 psyche... I hadn't heard about the exploration mission, that should be pretty interesting. Iirc, 16 psyche is thought to possibly be a fragment of a planetary core and so it might contain a completely different proportion of metals than what you might find on the Earth's surface.
The problems with this theory (and with asteroid mining in general) is that it is extremely unlikely that anything you mine in space will be economical to get back down. Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place -- if something was not worth the cost to launch it into space it is unlikely to be worth landing.
The problem with asteroid mining is that it faces one of the most expensive chicken-egg problems it is possible to imagine. Without industry in space there is no need for the bulk gathering of raw materials, but without the bulk raw materials it is not worth developing industrial processes for space and a zero-g environment.
The problem with asteroid mining is that it faces one of the most expensive chicken-egg problems it is possible to imagine. Without industry in space there is no need for the bulk gathering of raw materials, but without the bulk raw materials it is not worth developing industrial processes for space and a zero-g environment.
> Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place
Doesn't that depend on how you get it down.
Metal foam dropped from orbit into an ocean would float, you could have a retrieval vessel go pick it up.
Doesn't that depend on how you get it down.
Metal foam dropped from orbit into an ocean would float, you could have a retrieval vessel go pick it up.
Metal anything dropped from orbit at the speeds we are talking about would either burn up in the atmosphere or else hit the ocean surface and become lots of small chunks of something that is now sinking to the ocean floor. You need to shed a huge amount of delta-V just to get to the point where the landing site is described using any term other than 'impact crater.' Most of the mechanisms for dumping this energy tend to be a bit tricky to pull off and I am not sure, but there might be an upper limit after which ablation stops being a viable option.
If the foam ball you drop is large enough losses from ablation wouldn't be a big deal.
You can certainly get the speed down enough so that the words impact crater wouldn't be in the report, also you smack them into oceans not land (though smacking them into the desert would be an option I guess if you could shed enough speed).
For a 10 meter sphere of nickel foam with a density of 2000kg/m3 (so about 60% 'air' by volume) it's ~2000 miles per hour[1].
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/airfri2.html#c5
Fast but not insurmountable.
That sphere would be ~8000 tonnes of pure nickel minus ablative losses (which would reduce the impact speed).
Of course you'd want the density to be below 1000KG/m3 or it'd sink.
So a 10m sphere at 850kg/m3 would have a terminal velocity of ~1300 miles per hour - or about mach 2 and you'd be picking up about 3500 tonnes of pure nickel bobbing about.
I'd quite like to see that actually (from a good distance away).
You can certainly get the speed down enough so that the words impact crater wouldn't be in the report, also you smack them into oceans not land (though smacking them into the desert would be an option I guess if you could shed enough speed).
For a 10 meter sphere of nickel foam with a density of 2000kg/m3 (so about 60% 'air' by volume) it's ~2000 miles per hour[1].
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/airfri2.html#c5
Fast but not insurmountable.
That sphere would be ~8000 tonnes of pure nickel minus ablative losses (which would reduce the impact speed).
Of course you'd want the density to be below 1000KG/m3 or it'd sink.
So a 10m sphere at 850kg/m3 would have a terminal velocity of ~1300 miles per hour - or about mach 2 and you'd be picking up about 3500 tonnes of pure nickel bobbing about.
I'd quite like to see that actually (from a good distance away).
3.4 million kg, traveling at 600 m/sec, and you think you would end up with a big ball of floating nickle? Okay....
Not a physicist, but my thinking would lead me to say that when this ball hits the water (after having already been heated a bit by ablation on the way down) it is going to compress into a pancake. Assuming the energy released at impact does not break the ball into lots of smaller pieces, the energy of the impact is going to vaporize a lot of water and melt a lot of nickle. I think what you are going to end up with after the large impact event is a compressed blob of nickle that is now rapidly sinking to the floor of the ocean.
We already know what happens to big chunks of metal from outer space that impact the surface of the earth, it tends not to be pretty. Oh yeah, and try to convince any country on the planet to let you drop your giant ball of awe-inspiring kinetic energy on a path that happens to cross over them. Not. Going. To. Happen.
Not a physicist, but my thinking would lead me to say that when this ball hits the water (after having already been heated a bit by ablation on the way down) it is going to compress into a pancake. Assuming the energy released at impact does not break the ball into lots of smaller pieces, the energy of the impact is going to vaporize a lot of water and melt a lot of nickle. I think what you are going to end up with after the large impact event is a compressed blob of nickle that is now rapidly sinking to the floor of the ocean.
We already know what happens to big chunks of metal from outer space that impact the surface of the earth, it tends not to be pretty. Oh yeah, and try to convince any country on the planet to let you drop your giant ball of awe-inspiring kinetic energy on a path that happens to cross over them. Not. Going. To. Happen.
When you have the ability to make it into foam in space, why not use that to make lifting bodies out of it, and let them glide down, instead of crashing like a stone?
Stop thinking in terms of projectiles. Just because the Space Shuttle came down like brick in a controlled crash doesn't mean there are no other ways to do this. Without the need for ablation, btw!
Stop thinking in terms of projectiles. Just because the Space Shuttle came down like brick in a controlled crash doesn't mean there are no other ways to do this. Without the need for ablation, btw!
The lifting body idea is interesting, shape it so that it's got a flat side that self orientates (basically like an uncontrolled shuttle) and 'glide' (if you can call mach 1 gliding) it in, neat. You'd want to be very sure it was going to come down where you expected or you might affect rental prices.
I think one could aim for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_footprint in the seas near the coastline without much trouble.
You can't 'glide down' from orbit. You need to dump your delta-V somewhere. Stop thinking of orbit as though this chunk of metal is suspended from some big balloon out there. _Everything_ in space is moving, 0.0% if it is moving at the right speed and direction to enter the atmosphere and soft land without a lot of external assistance.
I know that. I've written elsewhere how I imagine that.
With modular thrusters which initiate the deorbiting, detaching when it is en route. Could be autonomous, could be 'tugboats' with human crew, I don't care. Doesn't really matter, as long as the lifting body of refined raw materials has the right weight to surface ratio, and therefore rarely even peaks above 400°C for a short time.
Meteorites that arrive on the Earth from outer space are most certainly a thing that happens sometimes, that's wear all our existing Mars rocks come from for instance. Whether something survives reentry depends on a lot of factors including the size of the object, the angle of re-entry, its composition, etc.
The thing is... we could outsource much of our current heavy- or other polluting industries 'up there', to finally remake the Planet of the Apes into the Garden of Eden, like it should be.
Wouldn't that be a nice goal?
Wouldn't that be a nice goal?
Nickel is so common and cheap it is unlikely to be profitable to ship it to Earth. It's more likely that nickel and iron would be used as construction materials in space, to make satellites and stations cheaper by reducing the launch mass required.
The profitable stuff to ship to Earth would be platinum-group metals, which have values in the tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But those require much more capital investment, as you need to get to farther-off asteroids and do more intensive in-space refining.
The profitable stuff to ship to Earth would be platinum-group metals, which have values in the tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But those require much more capital investment, as you need to get to farther-off asteroids and do more intensive in-space refining.
Mining an asteroid far away and then spend fuel to shuttle material from it to GEO or Moon seems rather uneconomical.
I would suggest finding a small enough (a few dozen kilotons) space rock made of a valuable / precious metal, and brought to it a large solar array and an ion gun. Metals make good ion gun fuel. Slowing the asteroid down to fall to an elliptic orbit around Earth, and then righting the orbit to put it on GEO or drop it to.the Moon seems doable with a rather limited use of mass. Technology permitting, a large enough solar sail could help slow down / steer the rock on its way towards Earth (or Moon, or Mars).
I would suggest finding a small enough (a few dozen kilotons) space rock made of a valuable / precious metal, and brought to it a large solar array and an ion gun. Metals make good ion gun fuel. Slowing the asteroid down to fall to an elliptic orbit around Earth, and then righting the orbit to put it on GEO or drop it to.the Moon seems doable with a rather limited use of mass. Technology permitting, a large enough solar sail could help slow down / steer the rock on its way towards Earth (or Moon, or Mars).
The fuel cost to shuttle the materials back would be fairly negligible. The main cost to getting anything into space at the moment is the initial launch to LEO. (This equation changes if you're not actually launching your mining vessel from the earth's surface)
The problem is, a single accident or mistake can put the entire earth’s population at risk. It seems highly unlikely we’d bring big rocks back to earth.
I suspect the value in asteroid mining will be for building things in space that will remain in space, due to the high cost of trying to launch material out of Earth's gravity well.
One theory in favor of space mining is that (and I personally believe this is wishful thinking) one asteroid might have a lot of titanium in it that would be worth trillions (and probably crash the titanium market).
But again, personally I think that's wishful thinking to try and get investors to push money into a space mining company. Based on nothing whatsoever, I believe most asteroids will be made out of fairly worthless materials.
But again, personally I think that's wishful thinking to try and get investors to push money into a space mining company. Based on nothing whatsoever, I believe most asteroids will be made out of fairly worthless materials.
The only substances that might have a chance to be profitably mined from asteroids are those that on Earth are concentrated at depths too great to be accessible and they are depleted at the Earth surface by thousands of times, or at least hundreds of times.
These elements are: 1. The 6 platinum-group elements 2. Rhenium and gold 3. Tellurium, selenium and germanium
Besides these elements, only indium might be profitable.
Indium is depleted only a little at the Earth surface, but its original abundance is very low, so additional extra-terrestrial sources could be useful.
From all the rare elements, indium is the one for which there are no good substitutes in its main applications.
Indium is completely irreplaceable in the best lighting sources (i.e. LEDs), in the best power semiconductor devices (with gallium nitride) and in the best transparent conductors (required e.g. for computer displays).
For transparent conductors there are great efforts to find a substitute and those might eventually be successful. Nevertheless until now all the alternatives have various disadvantages.
These elements are: 1. The 6 platinum-group elements 2. Rhenium and gold 3. Tellurium, selenium and germanium
Besides these elements, only indium might be profitable.
Indium is depleted only a little at the Earth surface, but its original abundance is very low, so additional extra-terrestrial sources could be useful.
From all the rare elements, indium is the one for which there are no good substitutes in its main applications.
Indium is completely irreplaceable in the best lighting sources (i.e. LEDs), in the best power semiconductor devices (with gallium nitride) and in the best transparent conductors (required e.g. for computer displays).
For transparent conductors there are great efforts to find a substitute and those might eventually be successful. Nevertheless until now all the alternatives have various disadvantages.
I thought the biggest cost of titanium today was extracting from the oxide, not the ore itself?
2016 prices: TiO2 $150/ton; metal $3750/ton — https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/
2016 prices: TiO2 $150/ton; metal $3750/ton — https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/
Titanium ore is cheap, and is produced at a large enough scale the market wouldn't crash. The expensive metals are platinum-group metals (iridium, osmium, rhenium, &c), which go for tens of thousands of dollars per kilo.
Rockets are expensive to launch from earth. If you can refuel in space it's a different story but where would you get the fuel from if you haven't mined an asteroid or the moon yet? It's a chicken and egg type of problem.
Physics followed closely by economics.
Have you seen the estimated values of ores in a decent asteroid?
I think it's technology and up front financing. Well, and there are probably space treaties that are problematic.
I'd drop an ion drive on the asteroid and nudge it towards the earth (but not AT it), and once it's in a stable near orbit, figure out what to do with a much faster communication loop with remotes/robots:
process in orbit, drop parts down to earth, or some combination.
100% chance SpaceX is considering this long-term.
I think it's technology and up front financing. Well, and there are probably space treaties that are problematic.
I'd drop an ion drive on the asteroid and nudge it towards the earth (but not AT it), and once it's in a stable near orbit, figure out what to do with a much faster communication loop with remotes/robots:
process in orbit, drop parts down to earth, or some combination.
100% chance SpaceX is considering this long-term.
Yes I have seen the "estimated values" of asteroids. They're not that meaningful as they're only estimates of reserves with no regard for production. Prices of platinum group metals are what they are because known reserves are limited and production even more limited. If you suddenly increase the supply of PGMs they're now much less valuable and their price drops. Extra supply doesn't automatically create extra demand.
But that's besides the physics problems. It's not in any way simple to attach an ion rocket to an asteroid and change its orbit. Today's best ion engines used on probes deliver fractions of a Newton of thrust and requires several kilowatts of power to do so. That's just to accelerate a relatively small spacecraft (Dawn is a bit under 2 tons).
Adjusting the orbit of an asteroid of a non-trivial size with an ion engine would take orders of magnitude more fuel, power, and time than the Dawn probe. Even if by some magic you managed to mine the fuel from the asteroid itself, a technological feat unto itself, you still need power and time.
Power and time are doubly impacted because most asteroids rotate. Unless that axis of rotation is perfectly aligned with the desired trajectory you can only apply thrust for at best half the asteroid's rotation. Rotating is problematic for power generation. If the asteroid miner is solar powered it's panels would be in shadow half the asteroid's rotation so it needs extra mass and complexity for power storage. If it's nuclear powered it's radiators are in continual sunlight for half the asteroid's rotation so additional mass and complexity is needed to rotate them parallel to the bearing of the sun to remain effective.
Even with all that it could take centuries to move an asteroid of any significant size with ion engines. Even if it only took decades that is still a huge initial outlay with zero payback for decades. The only way that's even remotely sane is if you spammed every asteroid with probes to assess their composition and knew you were pulling in the Comstock Lode. But then you depressed the price of all the material and the whole effort barely pays for itself.
But that's besides the physics problems. It's not in any way simple to attach an ion rocket to an asteroid and change its orbit. Today's best ion engines used on probes deliver fractions of a Newton of thrust and requires several kilowatts of power to do so. That's just to accelerate a relatively small spacecraft (Dawn is a bit under 2 tons).
Adjusting the orbit of an asteroid of a non-trivial size with an ion engine would take orders of magnitude more fuel, power, and time than the Dawn probe. Even if by some magic you managed to mine the fuel from the asteroid itself, a technological feat unto itself, you still need power and time.
Power and time are doubly impacted because most asteroids rotate. Unless that axis of rotation is perfectly aligned with the desired trajectory you can only apply thrust for at best half the asteroid's rotation. Rotating is problematic for power generation. If the asteroid miner is solar powered it's panels would be in shadow half the asteroid's rotation so it needs extra mass and complexity for power storage. If it's nuclear powered it's radiators are in continual sunlight for half the asteroid's rotation so additional mass and complexity is needed to rotate them parallel to the bearing of the sun to remain effective.
Even with all that it could take centuries to move an asteroid of any significant size with ion engines. Even if it only took decades that is still a huge initial outlay with zero payback for decades. The only way that's even remotely sane is if you spammed every asteroid with probes to assess their composition and knew you were pulling in the Comstock Lode. But then you depressed the price of all the material and the whole effort barely pays for itself.
Demand and supply. Much like DeBeers is stock piling low grade dimonds to not ruin market prices.
When the Spanish extracted all the silver and gold they could from South America, it caused a dramatic reduction in the value of silver and gold in Europe.
I.e. dropping a huge chunk of rare Earths onto Earth will make them not-so-rare and prices will collapse.
I.e. dropping a huge chunk of rare Earths onto Earth will make them not-so-rare and prices will collapse.
Only if you don't have a monopoly...
You have to sell it to make money.
It's like if Jeff Bezos dumped a big chunk of his Amazon stock on the market. The price would collapse.
It's like if Jeff Bezos dumped a big chunk of his Amazon stock on the market. The price would collapse.
I have seen people imagine what those ores are worth when they pretend that they are somehow magically transported to the surface of the earth, but I have never seen these same people budget the cost of the energy to retrieve, return, and land those same resources. If your value calculation did not go negative there then you are doing it wrong.
That's the interesting and confounding part of it. Going up to get them is expensive, sending them back rather less so.
(the major cost of doing anything in space is the earth surface to low earth orbit tax, which is going to be over half your cost. If you can avoid that tax, suddenly a lot of things become very interesting)
(the major cost of doing anything in space is the earth surface to low earth orbit tax, which is going to be over half your cost. If you can avoid that tax, suddenly a lot of things become very interesting)
Space treaties- means war, inevitably
Nudge towards earth
Stable near orbit
Remotes/ robots
Process in orbit
Drop to earth
Space X
Damn, you just outlined a horror novel in space
Damn, you just outlined a horror novel in space
See "Footfall" by Niven & Pournelle.
Wonderful book and very thought provoking. Agreed on Daemon being fantastic. I read these as audio books on the treadmill .. can't give it a higher recommendation.
in Delta-V - one character goes on a rant about how Mars is pretty much a dead end. Does anyone know how true this is?
Mars will certainly be challenging to colonize, but it has some major advantages that I believe outweigh the disadvantages.
First, water is pretty abundant almost everywhere on Mars.
Second, carbon is abundant and nitrogen is abundant enough to make food and plastic production viable.
Third, Mars has an atmosphere which is thick enough to provide some protection from radiation and meteorites but thin enough that conductive heat loss isn't too big of a concern. Also, aerobraking massively decreases the amount of fuel required to get to Mars.
Fourth, Mars probably has enough gravity to prevent most of the health risks associated with low gravity.
I don't think either Mars, the Moon, or asteroids are dead ends for colonization. In the long, long run I think more people will live in rotating habitats in cis lunar space than on Mars, and more people will live on Mars than the Moon, but I think there are enough resources for millions or perhaps billions of people to live on Mars.
First, water is pretty abundant almost everywhere on Mars.
Second, carbon is abundant and nitrogen is abundant enough to make food and plastic production viable.
Third, Mars has an atmosphere which is thick enough to provide some protection from radiation and meteorites but thin enough that conductive heat loss isn't too big of a concern. Also, aerobraking massively decreases the amount of fuel required to get to Mars.
Fourth, Mars probably has enough gravity to prevent most of the health risks associated with low gravity.
I don't think either Mars, the Moon, or asteroids are dead ends for colonization. In the long, long run I think more people will live in rotating habitats in cis lunar space than on Mars, and more people will live on Mars than the Moon, but I think there are enough resources for millions or perhaps billions of people to live on Mars.
What Mars lacks is a source of power. The solar incidence may be too weak to support much of anything. No fissile materials have yet been discovered there.
The Moon has plenty of solar to harvest.
The Moon has plenty of solar to harvest.
> What Mars lacks is a source of power. The solar incidence may be too weak to support much of anything.
Says who? The solar constant on Earth is about 1360 W/m².
Due to the atmosphere, only about 1025 W/m² actually get to the surface.
Mars, just from applying the inverse-square law has an average solar constant of about 589 W/m². Due to the lack of clouds and thin atmosphere, most of that reaches the surface.
So basically you get more than half the energy per unit area than on Earth. Coupled with batteries or power-to-gas and even wind power, I see no major power problem on Mars.
It's not as if there's a lack of usable land for solar arrays or big stacks of batteries on Mars...
Says who? The solar constant on Earth is about 1360 W/m².
Due to the atmosphere, only about 1025 W/m² actually get to the surface.
Mars, just from applying the inverse-square law has an average solar constant of about 589 W/m². Due to the lack of clouds and thin atmosphere, most of that reaches the surface.
So basically you get more than half the energy per unit area than on Earth. Coupled with batteries or power-to-gas and even wind power, I see no major power problem on Mars.
It's not as if there's a lack of usable land for solar arrays or big stacks of batteries on Mars...
The battery issue really cuts against most places on the Moon. Getting through 12 hours of night is a lot easier than getting through 2 weeks of night. There is the peak of eternal sunlight on the Moon's south pole where the sun marches around the horizon forever[1] but the lunar night is a big challenge everywhere else.
[1] And right next to an eternally shadowed crater we know has hydrogen, probably in water.
[1] And right next to an eternally shadowed crater we know has hydrogen, probably in water.
I haven't read the book and maybe the argument is solid, but I'm inclined to disagree. For mining, maybe Mars isn't the best place (hoisting stuff out of the gravity well might not be worth it except for high-value metals), but on the other hand it has decent gravity and an atmosphere, which means it's more suitable for human habitation and fuel processing than the asteroids. And living on a planet has a certain appeal that living on a ship doesn't.
In the far future we might have better habitats in the asteroid belt than on Mars, but that's pretty far out. In the medium term, I expect Mars will be an important fuel stop at the least.
I guess there'd be a kind of a self-perpetuating economic force at work: mining would be most lucrative when the products can be consumed near where they're made, and if there's a heavy demand for construction in the asteroid belts then the asteroid belts are where most of the materials will come from. If it's on Mars, then the materials will be gotten on Mars. (That's assuming that material shipment is expensive. On the other hand, if you can mine iron in the belts and then just lob it at Mars with a rail gun and have the Martians drive out in rovers to collect the splatters of molten metal off the surface, then maybe the economics of non-local mining can work out.)
In the far future we might have better habitats in the asteroid belt than on Mars, but that's pretty far out. In the medium term, I expect Mars will be an important fuel stop at the least.
I guess there'd be a kind of a self-perpetuating economic force at work: mining would be most lucrative when the products can be consumed near where they're made, and if there's a heavy demand for construction in the asteroid belts then the asteroid belts are where most of the materials will come from. If it's on Mars, then the materials will be gotten on Mars. (That's assuming that material shipment is expensive. On the other hand, if you can mine iron in the belts and then just lob it at Mars with a rail gun and have the Martians drive out in rovers to collect the splatters of molten metal off the surface, then maybe the economics of non-local mining can work out.)
Mars might not be worth the effort if you have good asteroid mining -
you could say build a O'Neil type cylinders inside an asteroid from local resources and spin them up. Some of the Tech you need for mining might transfer directly into tech or building structures like this. For instance refining metals in zero-G via rotating smelters to separate materials might serve as system to spin up and control the cylinder rotation.
You might even get most of the stuff aside from metals as byproducts of the metal refining process (water, oxygen(from oxids) and carbon mostly). Nitrogen and Phosphor might need importing.
Most of the leftover asteroid serves as Protection against small collisions.
You might even get most of the stuff aside from metals as byproducts of the metal refining process (water, oxygen(from oxids) and carbon mostly). Nitrogen and Phosphor might need importing.
Most of the leftover asteroid serves as Protection against small collisions.
If water/oxygen/carbon are readily available, I guess that would go a long ways towards making asteroids self-sufficient. On the other hand, if they're available but one can only extract a small amount at a time as a byproduct of mining, then Mars might still be pretty attractive where those things are available in inexhaustible quantities with low effort.
I'm assuming that huge amounts of methane (or other suitable fuel) and oxygen will be wanted for propellant, though maybe ion propulsion makes that less essential.
I'm assuming that huge amounts of methane (or other suitable fuel) and oxygen will be wanted for propellant, though maybe ion propulsion makes that less essential.
Mars is a good training ground as it does provide you something (gravity, abundance of resources), but after we're reading to take off the training wheels, moving enough resources from Earth to Mars to build a civilization is almost the same as moving the resources to ... not Mars - keeping them in space, in (probably rotating) space stations, and moving the whole station around to wherever the resources you need are (sunlight, water, carbon, metals, ...)
I’m not familiar with the contents of the rant but I don’t think anyone can know how well Mars colonization would go.
I couldn't find it on en.wikipedia, but Konstantin (the man) seems to have been a precursor of transhumanists: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Tsiolkovski#Cosmism... .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky
He was considered one of the founding fathers of cosmonautics in the USSR.
He was considered one of the founding fathers of cosmonautics in the USSR.
Yes, I believe he's on the left in the pantheon:
https://earth.google.com/web/@29.56025315,-95.08501348,28.52...
but the english wikipedia article talks mostly about those of his ideas which had substantial impact, and doesn't mention his more science-fictional manifestos.
(My guesses: Циолковский, Королёв, Гагарин, ??)
(My guesses: Циолковский, Королёв, Гагарин, ??)
I believe the last photo is Alexey Leonov possibly with Pavel Belyaev (not really sure), of the Voskhod 2 mission. Leonov was the first person to do a spacewalk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Leonov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Belyayev (some interesting tidbits about the Voskhod 2 mission there)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Leonov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Belyayev (some interesting tidbits about the Voskhod 2 mission there)
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