/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11647081
Its perfectly feasible in theory.
The problem comes from the practical economic side of things. Namely having to lift up thousands of tons of heavy equipment and figure out large scale zero-g construction thats good enough to keep your miners alive and well.
The smart first step would be to guide a nice m type asteroid into earth orbit and figure out how to do that stuff with the relative safety net of earth right there in case something goes wrong.
Eventually youd want to move all your heavy industry into space because the EPA doesn't give a shit about the air quality of vacuum.

>>11647081
desu whats stopping a group of people from getting on a starship like spacex's with dried food, a spacesuit, and a pickaxe and just going to a mineral-rich rock and mining it, maybe the whole round trip takes 8 years. What are the major hurdles holding someone back today?

>>11647081
Vesta asteroid is a very good target because it is the smallest differentiated solar system body, meaning it has both volatile rich crust, metal rich core and a rocky mantle in between.

>>11647107
Aside from other things, it is radiation and zero-g health hazards.

To spend more than a year in space, you need shielding against galactic cosmic rays, at least several tons per square meter of plastic/water/fuel/soil. This is A LOT of mass.

You also need to tie two Spaceships together by a tether for rotational artificial gravity.

>>11647107
Its a problem of scale.
Say you and your prospector friends find a solid gold asteroid, before you start doing the prospector shuffle from treasure of the sierra madre remember that the price of gold (or any resource) is tied up in its scarcity.
Now you've got a single source that represents more gold than currently exists in the crust of the earth and that has ever been dug up.
Now, thanks to you, there is no scarcity. Youve kicked the bottom out of the supply side of supply and demand.
Now the more you extract to sell to earth to recover the massive expense of the endeavor the less it is worth, which means you've got to flood the market with even more to cover the difference which bottoms out the price even more until you can't even give the shit away because you have enough gold to cover the surface of the earth.
Full scale space industry necessitates a resource based economic model.

>>11647134
>radiation shielding
easy fix, known since the 60s
>zero-g health hazards
just use centripetal force to simulate gravity, known since the 60s
>several tons per square meter of plastic/water/fuel/soil
If we use your idea of two spaceships tethered for artificial gravity, one could be purely storage, the other being mostly storage with some recreational/living space.
Also, several tons seems like a lot. Just get some dry food, some plants purely for oxygen, water of course will be the biggest problem but nothing impossible, and plastic i dont see the need.
>fuel
a cheap fuel ship could come by when the operation is done and refuel the ship, then be discarded in space. Same with all the waste, and all the mining equipment (if more is used than just a pickaxe and elbow grease)

>>11647136
But gold still has intrinsic value, it could be widely used in electronics and maybe more in the future. In fact the reason it is so expensive now as you said is scarcity. More gold wouldnt make gold worthless, just cheaper. Assuming one found a large enough deposit in space, one could still turn a profit

>>11647162
>Also, several tons seems like a lot

That is what it takes to protect against GCRs. For example our atmosphere is 10 tons per square meter.

>>11647172
>But gold still has intrinsic value
True, it has real application besides looking pretty, but what is its intrinsic price point? You can't really put an absolute value on it and it would sell the same as any other non prescious metal with an effectively infinite supply.
You can't even really corner the market since all you need is one spiteful guy who did the same thing as you with the sole intention of cutting your throat and underselling you.
I'm all for exploiting the resources in orbit around the sun but you've got to factor in the paradigm shit it would have on economics.

>>11647183
Just keep cocooning yourself in slag and ice.

>>11647172
>one could still turn a profit
not to mention that the profit happens BEFORE the mission. Speculators who would benefit off gold being cheaper invest and crashing the gold market doesn't matter because you're making money for your investors by doing it.

We would need the vast resources. Even just mining one asteroid would provide the entire worlds hostrical supply of prescious metals. Once he started off on the first hurdle, then we can scale up production of stuctures where titanium would be cheaper than steel or something.

Since zero g would be easier to move mass and heat dissipation; my guess would be multifunctional gathering-printing drones that can 3d print foundations with the existing metals, or 3d print aerodynamic pallets that could be catapulted back to earth.
Small enough with a largw cross section could have them easily surve the trip especially in orbit with minimal horizontal velocity.

>>11647119
and it might even be small enough to actually mine the mantle?

>>11647524
raw Titanium ore is already cheap, and it's no harder to extract than aluminum. The reason that nobody makes anything out of it is that it's a nightmare metal that catches on fire or corrodes into nothing at the drop of a hat.

>>11647657
Wait what, how does it corrode? I'm familiar that titanium particulates are highly flammable but I thought titanium as an commercialized alloy has great anti corrosive properties because of its top layer

>>11647524
I want platinum toilet pipes

>>11647694
yes, and as long as that top layer is chemically intact it'll stop all atmospheric corrosion basically
but that top layer can be trivially defeated by a small contamination of certain types of metal

>>11647635
Why that would be a problem?
Forget Earth, we're talking about low gravity. And no lava.

>>11647929
no, that's a good thing
mantles have a lot of stuff that's really rare in the crust

>>11647107
Mining it with what, pickaxes?

>>11647081
Asteroid mining needs to be done at the same time if not after early lunar colonization and fusion fuel mining operations.

>>11647136
that's why you flood the market juust enough to bankrupt terrestrial producers, then start withholding supply once you control the largest part of the market and bring the price back up

>>11647136
I think you should give a read on how the diamond industry works.

>>11647254
The price will depend on the value of the goods you will be able to create with it. The size of these markets will determine how scarce the product will be (assuming no artificial scarcity - which is a very naive assumption). This has already happened to some metals like Indium.

>>11647136
>Full scale space industry necessitates a resource based economic model.
not at all. When it's a 50/50 whether any operation will succeed, you'll have plenty of people willing to bet for/against you. Saying "I'm going to mine enough gold to crash the market" doesn't crash the market. What it does do is attract investors and you draw up exclusivity contracts and make deals and lock a fortune behind them that hinges on the success of the mission. If you succeed, you're rich, regardless of what happens to the gold market or whatever—you made your money probably a decade before it actually happened.

Could aluminium be mined on asteroids and used as the base metal for spaceships built in orbit?

How hard would it be to mine, refine and machine aluminium plates for spaceship construction in 0g?

>>11647081
Economically viable once cheap vehicle becomes a thing. Its all about economics.

>>11648691
>How hard would it be to mine, refine and machine aluminium plates for spaceship construction in 0g?
Easy, the hard part is getting it up there

>>11648691
we need robots that can build spaceships

>>11648714
Wouldn't the large energy requirement of turning bauxite into aluminium be a very difficult challenge to overcome?

>>11648720
Lets start by using humans with specialised equipment

We could launch 1,000 cubesats/microsats with microrovers to every major body in our solar system, within a year if we really wanted to. We could answer almost every question we have about our solar system. Why aren't we doing this? How is this not a priority? Why do we continue to do everything so wrong when it comes to space exploration?

>>11647119

>>11647099
>Eventually youd want to move all your heavy industry into space because the EPA doesn't give a shit about the air quality of vacuum.
An argument not pushed hard enough

>>11647254
Imagine the economic damage if they found a chest of bitcoins on the moon!

>>11649012
holy shit, rice krispies for days

>>11648691
Iron is a lot more abundant and doesn't even rust without atmosphere.
Or you can make steel, lots of it.
Never underestimate steel.

>>11647635
small enough to mine the core directly

>>11649640
dank