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How You Could Make Asteroid Mining Work With Todays Tech


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#1 Kalimaster

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Posted 01 June 2020 - 07:24 AM

How Could We Make Asteroid Mining Work with Todays Technology!

1. Most of the time rockets are fired from Florida. This could be done, also we could refurbish three or up to even five of the unused missile silos. We could then launch rockets with the intended purpose of "Space Mining".

2. We could use a pusher module, an unmanned space craft that would go out to the asteroid belt, grab hold of a suitable asteroid, and bring it back to earth. This vehicle would pick out a low risk asteroid on the edge of the field, grab hold of it using robotic mandibles, and return after making sure that it's departure would not blast any other asteroids where we don't want them to go.

3. Alternately, a capture module, either one that opens up a protective nose cone or in a side compartment and pulled in via a robotic arm.

The asteroid, brought back to earth could either be brought into a stable orbit and mined in space where mining shuttles would bring down the asteroids for ore extraction, or the capture modules would descend to safe landing zones where the materials could be recovered.

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#2 B0oN

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Posted 01 June 2020 - 08:19 AM

3 things missing to even try this :

-Political will
-Money
-Balls

#3 Davegt27

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Posted 03 June 2020 - 10:35 PM

my first question is what are you trying to mine ??

#4 LordNothing

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Posted 05 June 2020 - 01:46 AM

View PostB0oN, on 01 June 2020 - 08:19 AM, said:

3 things missing to even try this :

-Political will
-Money
-Balls


as is often said on the ksp forum, "no bucks, no buck rogers". what you need is someone with a lot of money who wants more money and a business plan that produces that result. political will is only relevant if the launch its government funded or subsidized. things get a lot easier when capitalism is the main driver. balls is not a problem, if you can fill jobs like sewer diver, stunt man, and test pilot, you can certainly get astronauts.

technology is there or close. when we can demonstrate things like inter-ship refueling, better power systems (solar panels/rtgs/nuclear reactor, fusion, etc), better engines (plasma/nerva/fusion/ol' boom boom), in sito resource utilization (if you are mining you are doing this, but also being able to make fuel while on mission). some of these things are necessary, some are nice to haves, others we may already have.

another problem is infrastructure. when you mine asteroids, is it with astronauts or robots? where do these astronauts live? who or what fixes the robots? where can you refuel? communications, got enough relay sats? where do you do the smelting? where do you store your stockpiles? stuff you got to figure out. pretty much all this means you need to build things in space. fourtunately humans are good at building things and going into space.

if you want to build a mass driver on ceres to return cargo to earth. build a space station out in the belt. likely a station with gravity and a lot of rad shielding, maybe a surface base (put it next to your railgun and sandbag it). you need to move crews to and from earth, maybe with some kind of cycler station. fuel is the big one as you have no way to replace it. but if you can find a waste product in asteroids like various ices which can be processed into either fuel or reaction mass. so processing one asteroid fuels the ship to get to the next one. periodically you drop by your rail gun and shoot your cargo into a retrieval orbit or exchange crews at the cycler. it may be less energy intensive to carry your smeltar with you on your mining ship rather than just hauling ore. some manufacturing capabilities would be nice as spare parts might come with a year or more of lead time and it also helps if everything is being built to be serviceable by astronauts.

if we came to the point where we absolutely needed to mine the asteroid belt, where not astroid mining would somhow stop humans from existing, we could probibly get out there in a decade.

Edited by LordNothing, 05 June 2020 - 01:58 AM.


#5 LordNothing

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Posted 05 June 2020 - 01:59 AM

View PostDavegt27, on 03 June 2020 - 10:35 PM, said:

my first question is what are you trying to mine ??


mine all the things. in space, nobody cares about unchecked industry destroying the planet.

#6 B0oN

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Posted 05 June 2020 - 09:17 AM

View PostDavegt27, on 03 June 2020 - 10:35 PM, said:

my first question is what are you trying to mine ??

Anything that´s worth a dollar or two or anything globally (in a strategic, human-kind encompassing kind of way to say) useful .
**** those national borders, they are boring and are holding ALL of us back like a frigging leash ... I hate to see and feel this and I´ve been hating this feeling 37 out of 40 years of my life .

#7 kalashnikity

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Posted 29 June 2020 - 09:27 PM

problem #1 It costs $10,000 to put a pound of payload in Earth orbit. A lot more than that to get your mining equipment to the nearest asteroid (past Mars orbit)

Problem #2, dropping rocks from orbit is both dangerous and expensive, read "The moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein

The only economically profitable use for asteroid mining would be for building space ships and habitats in a space dock/shipyard.

Unless you can mine and purify your products in space and THEN ship them to earth...

You could use a bunch of mirrors to melt asteroids to make more mirrors and then use all those mirrors to melt even bigger asteroids, etc.

Check out the Troy Rising series by John Ringo.

I think we are getting close to being able to build factories that build themselves. 3-d printing is a bid part of it. There is a new form of 3-d printing that uses metal as the material. Once we cross that threshhold...asteroid mining will be profitable once the first "space mining factory that builds copies or itself" is online we will see a cascade effect.





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