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Mining the Sky

logicmag.io

43 pointsraleighm19 comments

A lot of people assume material from space only has value when brought back down earths gravity well. This is short sighted and naive imo. The real value is in building space based industry and settlements ie O’neil cylinders. It maybe true that a gravity well is necessary for some industrial processes. This why low gravity bodies like the Moon and Mars are important.

Whether Earthlike conditions are necessary for industrial processes is beside the point. Nobody knows how to do any industrial process in space and there is sharply limited demand for space industry right now.

Maybe if we get a lively asteroid mining industry going, that will generate demand for other industries in space. Trying to get everything going all at once takes an already insanely difficult project and layers orders of magnitude more complexity on it before payoff.

> Nobody knows how to do any industrial process in space...

False. Don’t conflate your own ignorance with that of others. There’s an enormous body of literature on in situ resource utilization and in situ manufacturing, including countless lab-scale demos of industrial processes and some also demonstrated in space (for instance, ISS relies on electrolysis for oxygen production and also produces methane with the Sabatier Reaction to recover some of the oxygen as well). Just check out ntrs.nasa.gov for some examples.

There are way too many processes to name here.

Oh god. Did you just suggest electrolysis as the kind of exciting industry that we know how to do in space?

In second grade, I assembled some equipment to do electrolysis. This does not make me a captain of industry.

I'm with you here - I'm really not sure how a load of lab studies [in a gravity well], theoretical papers [also in a gravity well] and some fairly predictable processes in low gravity equate to humanity's 'knowing' how to 'do' a wide range of heavy industrial processes that haven't, for the very most part, ever even been attempted.

I have a fairly hands on job in many ways - one that allows me to explore and develop techniques - so whilst I can often envisage solutions in advance, I'd think it absolute hubris to claim I 'know' much until I've actually done it and proven it.

As far as I'm aware, I can't think of anything in even the light industrial range of development that's actually been tried in orbit or low gravity, off-surface.

Certainly not enough to deserve being smeared by accusations of ignorance... .

- ed

I suppose construction of the ISS from pre-made components might qualify as 'light industrial'.

It's pretty simple, actually. You put the process you developed in a centrifuge if it doesn't work in microgravity. Much of the life support (and water recovery) system on ISS (which is just a large collection of several industrial processes) uses centrifuges for this purpose.

You make it sound so easy!

Consider a 'simple' example — what might the effect be of a high speed, high mass 'drilling widget' be in such a body? Not much, probably, at least in the very short term.

Cumulatively though? A device weighing a few hundred KG, rotating at a few thousand RPM for a few hours or days or weeks at a time?

What effect do you think that might have on your 'quite simple' centripetal environment, floating as it is in zero g?

Sure, it can be accounted for — but it's not 'pretty simple, actually'. Anything but.

The sentence I responded to said "Nobody knows how to do any industrial process in space" not "exciting industry." Electrolysis is an industrial process, and not only do we know how to do it (as you showed in second grade), but it is done operationally.

You set the bar pretty low, easy to prove you wrong.

If you are after winning arguments with nitpicking, then congratulations, you won. But clearly he meant serious industrial production in space. That means producing things more complex than simple parts from a 3D printer. (which is still awesome, but just not serious industrial manufacturing which is the topic here)

Except he'd still be wrong if that was his point. There's an enormous body of work on even sophisticated industrial processes (reducing metals, producing oxygen from rock, producing glasses, producing high quality electronic materials, optical glasses of a quality not available on Earth, etc, etc) and how to do them in space. This is basically Dunning-Kruger in action, reinforced by the fact that most people on HN are also completely unaware of this large body of literature (but like the idea of being that intellectual skeptic). Seriously, give it a quick search: https://ntrs.nasa.gov

Since I am a space enthusiast myself and I seriously want to work on a moon base in my life, I believe I know a bit, what is going on. And as I said, it is awesome. And I believe we basically have allmost all the needed technology to do industrial production in space. But we are not doing it yet, nobody has done it. Therefore we don't know if it will really work, or if there will be problems we have not thought about and did not show ul in the limited experiments done so far. So I believe it can be done and any problems be solved (and there will be many) - but postulating a robot-rocket building industry on the moon and actually building one, are two different things. Because there are many, many, many processes needed, to keep a complex factory running, so many supply lines. And even when you focus on building only the basic parts and import the complex ones, like computer chips from earth - still very hard and unproven.

Because this is what people mean, when they talk about space industry. Not just extracting oxygen from rock.

The issue is that, presently, all the engineers, and the industrial base, are on Earth. So, space has to value-add to Earth in order to pay their salaries, if any effort is going to persist long enough to get to the self-sustaining picture you speak of.

Being short-sighted is sometimes correct- you’ve got to cross the foreground to reach the distance.

> Luxembourg is very bullish on asteroid mining. They think it’s gonna be a huge business five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now.

That timeline seems comically bullish. What's the biggest thing we've brought back to earth on an unmanned mission to date? Probably a few grams of asteroid dust. That timeline is maybe right for autonomous cars, but I doubt we'll see mining on an economically significant level in any of our lifetimes. It just doesn't make sense from a cost perspective when we have plenty of resources on earth that can still be extracted. I guess you can make a case for doing it to learn how to build things in space, but again, the engineering hurdles are huge, so no way that's going to matter any time soon.

Mining platinum group metals from asteroids could be economically viable within our lifetimes. Those elements are expensive and very rare in the Earth's crust.

The Soviet Union brought back about 300 grams of lunar material in the ‘70s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock#Unmanned_sample_retu...)

Still not much, but quite a bit more than a few grams.

And the us brought back 842 lbs of moon rocks according to wikipedia.

Unless they master some sort of hive/swam worker architecture which works in an autonomous way the timeline seems very aggressive. Sending humans to space that far out on asteroids can be super expensive project to get materials available on earth.

> there’s a lot of money to be made in making outer space safe for extractive capitalism.

> There are only so many sovereign countries. Luxembourg is one of them. And throughout its history, it has survived by making laws that businesses want. It’s as though lobbyists write their legislation. In fact, sometimes they do.

> It’s going to look like the extractive industries on earth. It’s going to be a repeat of what we're seeing in Congo. Now, one big difference is that there aren’t any humans to suffer human rights abuses up in space, so that’s good.

It's frank, I'll give it that.

Hooray for the future...!

Does all this space mining talk refer to the asteroid belt past Mars?

Or are there other sources?

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