ot: 1 min of silence

[El_Phil]

Hope I'll give you. I think we can discount the ESA, lets be honest they do struggle to get a rocket working properly. Chinese who really knows?

But we are talking a massively expensive project with no real benefit. There's almost nothing you couldn't get out of unmanned missions that a manned mission could do. I mean before attempting anything manned virtually bullet proof tech. would be needed, so just stick that in an unmanned probe and you slice costs by several orders of magnitude.

I think the moon race sums it up, the US loafs up there and.... Doesn't send men back because there's no reason to go. The moon race at least had the vauge justification of beating the Soviet Union, advances in missile technology, etc.

The only reason to go to Mars is the prestige or because its there. Hell of a reason for spending trillions of dollars.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Why go into space? I think this explains it:

Subject: Re: Manty Money
Author: Graydon Saunders
Date: 01 Apr 2005 06:48 PM
On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 11:56:13PM -0500, honorverse Listmanager
scripsit:

[below]

> From: "Jonathan Briggs"
[snip]
> "Precious" metals are pretty to look at and hard to find or make for
> yourself. Metal is also good because the government can't just make
> more of it on demand. But, if paper money has those same qualities then
> it is equivalent.

Keep in mind that the tech level in the Honorverse is such that they
bulk-process asteroids.

Which, going by asteroids in this solar system, means they use platinum
for cheap cafeteria spoons and gold for costume jewelry.

1 cubic km of asteroidal nickel iron is a sphere 620 m in radius; it has
a mass of something like 24 billion tons, and if it's 0.02 % gold,
you're left with a mere 4.8 *million tons*.

[El_Phil]

Mining asteroids? *cough* b***ocks *cough*

Sorry about that but I am a minig engineer and the idea is ridiculous. The costs will be brutal, certainly epically in excess of any deposit on earth. Hell getting gold out of seawater would be cheaper.

Assuming dirt cheap space flight and all the other odds and ends to get enough gear to the asteroid, or move the asteroid to your mining site, you face two major problems.

1. Nickel-Iron compounds are very very tough. How on earth are you going to cheaply break them up?
2. So you have your small chunks of nickel-iron. How do you get the gold out. Any recovery process relies on communation (breaking down the ore) which as we've established is difficult/expensive and then there's actually getting to the gold.

Now of course the tech. for all this probably will be developed, but frankly my money would be on other planet mining happening. Mercury probably would be the best prospect, lots of solar energy and it's very dense which would suggest lots and lots of heavy metals in the crust.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Mining asteroids for goldwould indeed be expensive I agree (or rather go with you, you're the mining student here) but what if you look for other metals? Perhaps the nickel-iron compounds ARE the stuff you're looking for.

And about mining the asteroid:

You don't need to get the asteroid anywhere, just pick a rather large, rather static one at the edge of the Belt and place robotic/remotecontrolled drills there to extract materials. Excess materials (like simple rock) could be vented into space or stored separately, the ores you want could be picked up periodically by (again) robotic/RCed transport shuttles that ferry the cargoes to a space station or colony where it is processes then shipped, or simply shipped out and processed elsewhere.

It could be a massively useful exploit once we exhaust Earth's raw material deposits.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Exhaust? Most of the metal is simply rusting in conveniently-placed piles. Admitadly, we will have a problem with fossil fuels, but, among other things, I saw a show on nova, I think it was, once, about some people who had gotten candlewax to burn at 85% the efficiency of rocket fuel.

[deccan]

Going to space for natural resources is pretty implausible unless some kind of major technological revolution, I'd agree.

In the near future, it'd all be about tourism and vanity.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Narf, that would be paraffin. That is indeed candlewax, but it has been in use as a liquid fuel since the Industrial Revolution IIRC. And about the metals, yes, you are right, but if we plan to colonize our system we will need mucho mucho metallicos and that is present in the Asteroid Belt. I don't know/think that we will be able to make do with Earth's production once we get a few colonies up-and-running.

And I wasn't necessariy talking about the near future, it could be 200 years from now, or 1000, or 10000, I don't know. I was just stating that it could be plausible to mine asteroids.

[El_Phil]

We are talking a century plus, minimum, for all major metals. One Brazilian iron ore mine, on it's own, could supply the world for over a century at current rates. Some speciality ones less, but then no-ones been prospecting for them becuase well, they're speciality.

Take Tantalum. Barely until mobiles phones and other small electronics come along, then wallop massive demand. On Australian exploration firms finds a very nice deposit, gets it going and grabs 70-80% of the market. So on paper when that runs out we run out of Tantalum, however:

1. Once Greenbushes was open everyone stopped looking because you not only had to find a deposit you had to find a really cheap one. Given it was rare to start with no-one bothered.
2. Tantalum can be subsituted with Selinium and shed loads of other sutff from the weirder parts of the periodic table
3. Worst case there's always slave labour mined Tantalum from Sierra Leone, DRC and other west/central Aftican war zones. You didn't think it was just blood diamonds did you?

So frankly I can't see asteroid mining happening.

Fossil fuels: Coal for almost half a millenium, oil/gas there's been only 35/40 years left for almost 40 years now. Whilst that can't go on forever there's still most of Siberia, Antarctic, Alaska, Rockall and the deep South Pacific basin to explore. Not even counting oil shales/sands of which the US known reserves could meet their oil needs for around 350 years.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I SAID it could be 10k years or more..... sheesh.

[El_Phil]

Well remembering all that took a while, so I didn't actually see your newer post before I finished.

If your kicking it out that far then no-one's can claim to make a stab based on anything other than guess work. So here goes

I'd guess that once most of the solar system is colonised and/or terraformed that's when asteroid mining is going to come into it's own. Loads of cheap fusion or cleverer power, funky hi-powered lasers or some clever anti-matter explosives to break the buggers up and robotic processing plants. Let's be honest with enough power to throw at a problem you can normally solve it.

Finally once you've gone to all the effort of terrafroming a planet you're going to want to keep it nice and clean, so planetery mining isn't going to be popular.