Ceres: An ocean world in the asteroid belt
astronomy.com
astronomy.com
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dear-dawn...
Nah but that's probably the smallest gripe one can have with Ceres station. Spinning up a planetoid so it has 0.3 g negative gravity and doesn't tear itself into a quintillion pieces is quite a bit more questionable.
Of course you might be able to do some stuff internally as you hollowed out the thing too like perfuse it with high tension wires kind of like steel reinforced concrete, but it seems like a huge job at least on par with building giant space stations.
Still you might be onto something with the radiation shielding.
my favorite show ever, imo best sci fi show ever. Ceres station in the books/show is a really cool idea even though it's got several reasons why it couldn't actually work
Here's @NASA's: https://x.com/NASA/status/1478118356309921792?t=1qK3gqdbZoJl...
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezU-F028krU
Many of us know we won't live long enough to see the results of any sort of mission to Europa or Titan meant to detect life in their deep, liquid oceans (if these oceans in fact exist, if we ever get there and are able to drill to them). Not only is Ceres much closer, but if this article is accurate, access to the subsurface ocean could be quite close to the surface. Here's hoping it comes to fruition.
Over the next 2 years, I expect SpaceX to send a lot of probes out.
First, mass to orbit is super cheap now. Second, part of the whole R&D for Mars will be to try a variety of long range engine types and configs, and they love to iterate fast and play.
So I expect probes sent in Mars' direction, but also elsewhere to explore. And I cannot stress this enough, they are clearly capable engineers, but these probes don't need 10 years of development and hyper engineering, because cost to orbit is meaningless.
A probe fails? Who cares! You sent 5 different designs, and can just send more anyhow.
NASA was concerned about cost to orbit, but also perception. A lost probe would be a "waste to taxpayers", and just getting launch windows was a chore. I remember some probes had to wait years for space on the shuttle, so constrained was lift frequency.
But SpaceX is OK with blowing stuff up during tests, with learning as they go. So I imagine 2 years max, they'll be spewing satellites all over the place, without a concern if they fail early, or even make it.
Yet some will. Many will.
And you can bet some will head to asteroids.
Note: at this point someone usually chimes in with how hostile space is, and cheap probes won't work, and yada yada.
I didn't say cheap. Cheap implies skimping out on part quality or construction. You don't need to do that, as the parts are not remotely expensive compared to R&D, dev time and custom build work. In fact if one removes R&D, part cost isn't noticeable.
This means that scale is cheap. Building 1000 probes is almost the same cost as 1. And launch is now super cheap.
Access to Space is on the verge of when airplanes became unremarkable.
And it's coming faster than we think.
Except that it doesn't. Refueling in LEO only helps if your gas station is in the same orbital inclination you need for your target. As each interplanetary launch will be via a different orbital plane/inclination, there is little use for generic infrastructure. Just using a bigger one-time rocket will be more efficient than trying to refuel and then boost interplanetary from an inappropriate orbital plane.
Now in higher orbits refueling can start to make sense as inclination becomes less of a handicap, but boosting from a higher orbit is less efficient than from a lower (oberth). A single larger rocket will still be the way to go.
There's no point of conceiving of a world where we can afford to launch fuel but still have to treat every single launch as exceedingly precious and expensive such that we can only afford to set up One Fuel Depot in space, the way we have One Space Station. Either this gets cheap enough that SpaceX basically has a "launch + more fuel launch(es)" as a standard package or it never happens at all, there isn't much in between.
Further, my post mentions new propulsion designs.
You're also 1980s thinking launches are expensive. They're cheap, and mass to orbit is cheap, and going to get much cheaper.
We all need to understand the change that is coming. Getting to space is being removed as a barrier. Think about projects where mass to orbit cost is unimportant, or think of projects where many launches is not a concern.
Think of 1000 super light, highly disposable attempts to make tiny sensor platforms which can endure distance, environment, and time.
Keep in mind losing 1/2 of them, even all is just fine, if you gleam valuable data to iterate and move down a path of low cost, tiny workable design.
It's not 1980. Cost to space is cheap. We now need to work on cost to planets, and even other solar systems.
We need to test engine designs, new methods of hardening platforms, all with low cost, simple designs.
And to others, yes, space is hostile. So? That's why we're iterating on a fix.
The cost difference between a spacecraft with a 50% failure rate and one with a 1% failure rate is basically not a thing. If you are at 50% success then you are already doing 99% of the job correctly. It is comparable to professional sports. If your NFL team wins a game or two during a season, you must be doing 99% of things right.
>> It's not 1980. Cost to space is cheap.
The cost for an interplanetary shot hasn't changed all that much recently. The SpaceX stuff is efficient to LEO/GEO and the moon... at a stretch. (Even the moon would require a variety of new refueling techs.)
It made me wonder, because it seems like even if someone had easy access to $100 trillion worth of platinum, they would no longer have $100 trillion worth of platinum. How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
It's also mildly entertaining to consider that while the quote I mentioned was intended to express the idea that asteroid mining would make someone a trillionaire, it might have been prophetic yet gotten things exactly backwards. With Bezos and Musk both having space programs, it seems plausible that compound interest could bring us to a future where the first trillionaire becomes the first asteroid miner instead of the other way around.
If you're just selling the minerals that might be the case. If you also have a vertically integrated company that produces things that use a lot of minerals (batteries), you might just be able to use all these things yourself, and sell them for more than the base cost of the material.
The same way that DeBeers did.
Plus, you could also buy up the manufacturers that actually use this. Platinum price drops, but you're also benefitting from getting it at-cost as you literally drop-ship it to your factory producing catalytic converters and microchips.
You can't (for practical reasons) instantly drop all of it on the market at once. As you increase production, terrestrial mines may decide to shut down based on price fluxations or increases in difficulty of mining the last remaining deposits. World governments might prefer to keep terrestrial mines as reserves for national security reasons and import space sourced materials when economically feasible.
Secondly, don't bring the resource back to Earth. Take it to the Moon, Mars, or orbital manufacturing facilities, to be used in further space exploration/colonization.
If you maneuver a big asteroid into Earth orbit, you can always just drop chunks of it on the heads of people you don’t like. Basically “rods from God”, but using mass that’s already in space. I wrote a book using that as the premise.
The estimate I've seen for the total amount of gold humans have ever dug up is an approximately 20m³ cube. Wiki says gold has a density of 19.283 g/cm³. If I'm doing my math right, that means we've dug up 154,264,000 kg of gold. If you value that at the current price of $85,000/kg, we've got $13 trillion of gold.
Compare that with the guesses they were making about the "value" of a single metallic asteroid, 16 Psyche, of $10 quintillion[0]. Coming into contact with the New World let pre-industrial civilizations 2x or 3x the resources they could access, while the boost from asteroid mining could give us six or more orders of magnitude. That 20m³ could be collected and put in a museum.
[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche...
It will depend on the level of competition in the launch market. If there's another reusable launcher (Blue Origin, say) then SpaceX will be constrained to not mark up the price too much and prices will be closer to costs, and anyone will be able to benefit from the cost reduction that allows large projects like this.
I think he's been pretty transparent that his recent interest in politics is downstream of his belief that Tesla and SpaceX will (continue to) be constrained by political action by one side more than the other.
In reality I think he's a narcissist who is getting addicted to the limelight and this is just another stunt to get people to talk about him. I don't think its a business decision.
This is relevant because the early origin of life on Earth is taken as evidence that origin of life is a fast, high probability process. But if its origin here depended on events that require such warm moist small bodies, then it may be that it either happened early or it wouldn't happen as all, and such an inference would be invalid.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_wat...
For reference, the surface temperature on Ceres varies from 110K to 235K, which is -163°C to -38°C in chart units, but "effectively zero pressure" (I can't find exact numbers for Ceres, but the 100×-heavier Moon is measured in nanopascals) is off the bottom of the chart.
The book The Vital Question by biochemist Nick Lane goes into this in great depth. https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-t... He estimated that simple, single celled prokaryotic organisms should be pretty common when the right conditions and probably happened multiple times independently on Earth, but eukaryotic mitochondrial cells may have only happened one single time and all complex life is descended from that one cell. I believe that was covered in https://lexfridman.com/nick-lane/) that
That's a really bad take that just won't die. Life being a fast, high probability process is one between quite a handful of explanations that fit it.
But anyway, adding Mars and the asteroids into the equation doesn't radically change the numbers.
Luckily for dreamers universe is vast.
The dogma is such that people who subscribe to it will often reflexively assume that anybody challenging it is a disingenuous Christian. FWIW I am not a Christian, nor do I have any other religion, but I think there is fair reason to doubt that advanced life is common. For one, you don't have to stack too many improbabilities to easily overpower the number of stars. Secondly, evolution isn't a process that works towards the goal of creating human-like advanced life; in fact if anything it favors crabs a lot more than smart apes. Third, and most important, the rare earth hypothesis is consistent with all of our observations thus far.
Emphasis mine. This is an enormously different and stronger claim than just "life is common". Personally I think it's most likely that cells are relatively common (given a habitable planet anyway), but anything as complex as a fish is very rare.
Because it's getting close to century already (no it didn't start with Carl Sagan), and we have an entire collection of alternatives nowadays.
This all has an uncanny resemblance to the "god of the gaps" phenomenon. As science explains more of our world, the religious cram their gods into smaller and smaller gaps in our scientific understanding. And as science shines light on the apparent sterility of Mars, alien life enthusiasts cram their proposed aliens into the ever smaller gaps in our knowledge of Mars.
My problem is with people insisting that's a certainty.
In the Expanse, water goes to Dusters, towards money? (at least that's down-well, gravity-wise?)