NASA mission to a $10k-quadrillion asteroid is two months from launch | Hacker News Reader

NASA mission to a $10k-quadrillion asteroid is two months from launch

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35 pointsBrajeshwar21 comments

If they started mining this thing, and extracted what would be $trillions worth of metal at today's valuation, the income generated would rapidly fall to a small fraction of that.

It might still be worth doing. If they were able to produce very large quantities of platinum-group metals, it might make chemical processes dependent on catalysis cheap enough to change the world.

For example, a process to produce ammonia economically, in a small installation at low temperature and pressure from just air and water, might enable a single farm to put up a wind turbine and generate all the fertilizer and tractor fuel they need locally. There are good catalysts known for ammonia synthesis that rely on gold...

Earth prices would probably remain the same because it would cost a lot more money to deorbit the materials, and people are going to want materials in orbit to build with. There would probably be two markets: terrestrial and orbital.

Platinum-group metal value might exceed the cost of de-orbiting it.

One method proposed to deliver that is to produce ingots embedded in foamed metal, and electrically accelerate them to an earth-crossing trajectory. It relies on atmospheric drag to de-orbit and avoids need for terminal delta-V maneuvering.

Railgunning platinum whiffle balls at the Earth is officially my favorite space mining proposal so far.

The real problem, as was so cogently noted in "Queen of Outer Space", is "how could they aim it"?

I'm a fan of the space frisbee method. Use solar energy to melt the metals in space and spin them out into disc shapes, and then launch them at earth.

We can make them ideal sizes and shape to encounter a minimum of drag heating but still small enough to not be a danger should they go off course slightly.

Couple that with a battalion of trained dogs for capture & retrieval.

I think the original idea was that the foamed metal would let them float on water, and you would collect them from the ocean. So, a fleet of trained sea lions, if you like. More seriously, tugboats.

Has anybody done napkin math on this ?

Ignoring the environmental impact, that would seem to be a lot of rocket launches to get some sort of space-mining equipment to the asteroid. Returning a lot of mass to earth, and landing it safely would also seem to be a problem. Something something Delta-V.

So maybe space-refining?

The key to making this work is the development of self replicating systems. We need to send seed factories[0] to asteroids or the moon to keep initial launch mass low. Once the seed factories produce sufficient copies of themselves they can produce larger scale mining equipment that can be used to refine the material in space before it is sent back to Earth for use in manufacturing.

Over time we can move more and more manufacturing off world to eliminate pollution that is destroying our ecosystem.

[0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories

I wonder if mistake was made in bringing parts of asteroid back to earth whose property it would be. Buy lot of land and aim piece there, but what if you miss and it hits some other country. Do you still get to claim it?

> $10k-quadrillion

love those units...no idea what they are but love them

Is that 10 yotadollars?

No, 10 exabux, but it is a lotadollars.

It’s just $10 quintillion. Not sure what they wrote it out like that…

I thought it meant a range - between $10k and a quadrillion. Like some sort of surprise - unwrap the asteroid and it’s either full of rocks or platinum.

Ever play No Man’s Sky?

The average person probably knows quadrillion is after trillion, but has not heard of quintillion before.

Thank God, they didn't say 20 billion goats or 50 billion dishwashers. ;-)

Some countries have national debts in the quadrillions (local currency).

For example Japan 1.3 quadrillion JPY, Indonesia 7.9 quadrillion IDR.

What the fuck is "10k-quadrillion" supposed to mean?

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