Asteroid Mining

[Serial_Worrier]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining

All of a sudden there's this new interest in mining asteroids for all our "rare earths" and whatnot. A question I'd have for planetary physicists would be how much mass of material can we extract from such bodies before having an adverse effect on the orbits of these bodies? Imagine mining some asteroid, and then suddenly it veers off course and slams into the Earth. Not good.

[dolanbaker]

Well, that's one way of getting the minerals down to earth quickly and cheaply!
No need to mine it at all.

[GASMON]

Asteroid Mining !!!!!!!!!

Ha! Ha! what a joke - the Yanks can't even send shithouse paper to the ISS anymore !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gas

[SeaGypsy]

+1 Gaz. Stupid distraction from reality is what this is all about.

[EnergyUnlimited]

At $ few tens of millions per kg it might work, so if asteroid is made of large, Cullinan size diamond crystals and relatively close to Earth, who knows?

But for all other purposes that is a plain nonsense.
More of that sh*t will be paddled around as distraction, while modern civilization goes down the drain.

And you don't need to be planetary scientist to work it out.
Just check how much it cost to bring lunar rock back, even by robotic probe.

[NickyBoy]

Just check how much it cost to bring lunar rock back, even by robotic probe.

A significant proportion of that cost is due to the requirement of escaping the Luna gravity well, which isn’t a factor when working with small Near Earth Objects.

Also folks need to remember that NASA is basically a bad joke, far removed from the achievements of its peak. Every time the private industry has run in parallel to NASA, they have been able to perform the same function for a tiny fraction of the cost. This includes getting objects up into orbit and getting them back down safely.

The cost of extracting NEO material for a private endeavour is likely to be less than 10% of the cost of NASA retrieving a Luna rock. At that cost, rare earth elements become profitable.

Of course, none of this matters if you have lost the ability to create fuel for your rockets .

[SeaGypsy]

For the same reason your laptop can run for hours on the energy it takes to go outside and measure up where to dig a hole, mining in space is way beyond our ability. We can create endlessly more efficient electronics (Moore's Law) but when it comes to digging holes in the ground there are hard limits. Compare the energy inputs required for deep sea mining (mostly limited to oil/ so far) to those on land for some appreciation of the maths involved. Nobody has invented the hydrogen powered engine to drive the mining equipment just to begin with, leaving whatever effort having to carry the bulk of it's fuel load, or a mass of batteries and solar panels/ with mandatory delays for recharge constraints. I think this is just something to try building a bubble around, really.

[HopDavid]

Of course, none of this matters if you have lost the ability to create fuel for your rockets .

It looks like the first resource they hope to bring back is water

Water can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen, one of the better chemical propellants. Propellant high on the slopes of earth's gravity well could make space transportation much less difficult and expensive.

[HopDavid]

A question I'd have for planetary physicists would be how much mass of material can we extract from such bodies before having an adverse effect on the orbits of these bodies? Imagine mining some asteroid, and then suddenly it veers off course and slams into the Earth. Not good.

Page 15 of this pdf

[Keith_McClary]

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