Reddit reviews Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy
We found 3 Reddit comments about Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Wavecloud Corporation
Have you read Asteroid Mining 101? It's by the Chief Scientist at Deep Space Industries and is a fantastic breakdown of the industry from a very technical and practical perspective. Closely related to that proposal and maybe helpful too.
John S. Lewis' books:
Mining The Sky
Rain of Iron and Ice
Asteroid Mining 101
>So "outdated" that you can't refute anything it says, or mention a specific ?
Touchy, eh? I didn't know that was your site, but it doesn't change my opinion. Though perhaps I should have said narrow-minded instead.
I'll touch on the three points you put at the top, for now:
>Reduce cost-to-Earth-orbit by a factor of 100 or so. Everything else depends on this. Probably means a new propulsion technology for surface-to-orbit.
Launch costs have traditionally been high not because of technical issues, but programmatic ones. The Space Shuttle is a prime example of this. If New Armstrong turns out to be fully reusable, as the plan is for the BFR, I expect the cost of space access to be drastically lowered - SpaceX themselves claims that the BFR will be cheaper to launch than a Falcon 1. Take their claims with a grain of salt, but I expect both they and Blue will continue working to drive down costs, no matter the time frame.
At the same time, though, building something such as a space elevator or laser launch system would definitely help drop launch costs further, but space elevators are currently impractical as we don't have the materials science for them, and laser launch would need a vast upfront investment. The military might pay for it - I don't see NASA attempting it.
>Find a place where we could build a self-sustaining colony.
This one's easy. We can build one almost anywhere we choose. In your 'Future' section you note all of these:
We don't need a planetary body to have any of that. I think you've fallen into the trap of what Isaac Asimov called 'planetary chauvinism' - expecting that we need to live on a planetary body. We don't. We have the technical ability, if not the funding or the political will, to build large colonies in space, where we can provide all of those above bullet points - with the exception of the magnetosphere, though full radiation protection is still doable. Take a look at Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier for more information.
>Develop a new propulsion technology for use in space. Carrying chemical rocket fuel around imposes huge penalties on every mission. In fact, eventually we really need faster-than-light (FTL) travel if we're going to go anywhere useful, but who knows if we'll ever get that ?
I think you're partially right here, but only partially. We do have other options for in-space propulsion - among them ion thrusters and nuclear thermal propulsion. Somewhat more out there is mass driver propulsion, but that's also doable from a technical standpoint. All three of these offer much higher ISP over chemical rockets, though they have their own tradeoffs.
Where I think you go wrong here is assuming to go anywhere useful we need FTL. Our own solar system is quite interesting enough, with lots of available energy and materials for us to use. While I'd love to see humanity gain the ability to go to other stars as well, you still don't need FTL for that. So long as you can accelerate to some reasonable fraction of lightspeed, you can go from star to star without expending too much of someone's lifespan. Theoretically, an antimatter starship would be a good bet for that.
As I've been doing other things in the process of writing this comment, I decided to add these comments:
Your comment on near-Earth asteroid mining: "Doesn't sound feasible to me." It is very feasible. About ten percent of NEAs are easier to reach, from an energy perspective, than the Moon, and many of those have a low return delta-V. Outside of that, while using chemical propulsion alone probably isn't the best idea, ion engines, mass drivers, and solar sails are all viable means of reaching and redirecting asteroids, should anyone choose to do that.
There are also vast resources contained within the asteroids - we can tell, using techniques such as spectrophotometry, polarimetry, and radiometry, what they consist of, so there's little risk of sending a probe out to one and coming up dry. You can find more information on projected asteroidal resources in Asteroid Mining 101 by John Lewis.
And I have to ask: why would you bother using a solid-rocket booster to move an asteroid? Seems ridiculous.
Your comment on competition, where you talk about the money wasted on spaceflight: I agree, actually - the money was wasted not because there are no resources in space, or that it's too expensive to exploit them - the money was wasted because of a few factors: a government monopoly on spaceflight; regulations prohibiting ownership of resources (now we're starting to see laws promulgated permitting private use), cost-plus and FAR contracting, which drove up costs, and an overall lack of direction or purpose. Now, as commercial companies start to ramp up operations, and look for incentives to keep costs low, we should finally see a change in the market. Each time previously there were too many factors still prohibiting vigorous commercial development - most of those barriers are now gone.
Your insinuation that unmanned probes are cheaper and more effective than manned missions:
A few notes here:
You might like to read this paper about the efficacy of humans vs. robots.
Exploration for scientific purposes should be both-and, not either-or. The more we move the economic frontier into space, the more science we'll be able to do, whether purposefully or as a byproduct.