Posted on 11/03/2014 2:26:13 PM PST by BenLurkin
So can we get off of Earth already and start building bases on the Moon or an asteroid? As highlighted in a recent Office of Science and Technology Policy blog post, one way to do that quickly could be to use resources on site. But how do we even get started? Can we afford to do it now, in this tough economic climate?
Universe Today spoke with Philip Metzger, a senior research physicist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, who has explored this subject extensively on his website and in published papers. He argues that to do space this way would be similar to how the pilgrims explored North America. In the first of a three-part series, he outlines the rationale and the first steps to making it there.
UT: It’s been said that using resources on the Moon, Mars or asteroids will be cheaper than transporting everything from Earth. At the same time, there are inherent startup costs in terms of developing technology to do this extraction and also sending this equipment over there, among other things. How do we reconcile these two realities?
PM: Space industry will have a tremendous payback, but it will be costly to start. Several years ago I was frustrated because I didn’t think that commercial interests alone would be enough to get it fully started within our generation, so I asked the question, can we find an inexpensive way for the governments of the world (or philanthropists or others who may not have an immediate commercial interest) to get it started simply because of the societal benefits it will bring? That’s why my colleagues and I wrote the paper “Affordable Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry and Solar System Civilization.”
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
You HAVE to believe there are precious metals on the Moon, and other ‘rocky’ inner solar system planets.
If there’s Gold here, there’s DEFINITELY gold elsewhere, among with other precious metals. However, how cost effective is it to mine and bring back? That’s where it gets interesting.
We both had and have the technology.
By now we should have almost all of our electrical power generated in space with simple, proven, steam generators.
Gerard K. O'Neill wrote about the colonization of space his in his book, "The High Frontier", which, thanks to a joint effort of the Space Studies Institute and the Space Frontier Foundation is still in print and available on Amazon.
In space you can build the structure of a space ship out of concrete if you have a means of fusing the material without water. You could print enormous spacecraft in micro gravity.
One of the ideas I’ve seen for mars is printing habitation structures with martian concrete using the abundant sulfur to bond it together. (Sulfur has a low melting point.)
“If there’s Gold here, there’s DEFINITELY gold elsewhere, among with other precious metals. However, how cost effective is it to mine and bring back?”
Also, when it comes to gold, keep in mind that the more of it you find, the less it is worth. Gold has been pretty stable since we discovered most of the exploitable gold on Earth by the end of the 19th century. Open up a bunch of mines on other planets, and it would lose stability again.
The easiest thing is to drill living quarters first, then just drill out. Hardly any oxygen leakage, no solar radiation, and no breaching.
Also, it’s doable on any moon or planet with a solid surface.
“Why Mine On The Moon Or An Asteroid?”
Because there the only places where the EPA will allow mining?
Imagine how expensive it would be to smelt iron ore in a vacuum. Fuel and O2 for the furnaces would have to be shipped from Earth and the kind of facility necessary to make that work would be a huge technological problem.
The first such bases will be necessarily exploratory in mission, which, just as they were in the New World, will need a government or corporate sponsor to take a bit of a loss in order to gain knowledge that would enable later arrivals to exploit it.
The problems on the moon itself will be technical. It's the problems on Earth that will likely pull the thing to a screeching halt. One question: who owns the Moon? Where would a private company go to register a claim on a potential mining field? Is it necessarily first come first serve? Are we setting ourselves up for an Oklahoma-style Moon Rush, robot horses pulling buckboards toward the claims at the shooting of a...er, laser?
Will there be a flurry of lawsuits stating that it is unfair to underdeveloped countries not to have a proportion of the Moon reserved for them? Or to have any profits generated expropriated for redistribution at the behest of some socialist at the UN?
These are not imaginary problems. The reason no one has stepped forward in private industry is the very real probability that someone on Earth will decide the whole thing belongs by right to somebody else. Nothing stops capital investment more than the prospect of it being stolen when it becomes big enough to be worth someone's (read: some government's) while.
Heinlein actually did deal with some of this in the book cited above, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. This will all be an issue until the Moon can have a government and citizens of its own to speak up for it, to defend it, to tell greedy, arrogant, dictatorial Terran tyrants to go steal something else. If that sounds a little familiar with respect to the New World, it was supposed to.
Actually, mining on the Moon is relatively easy because the only thing of value there is Lunar dust, which contains relatively large amounts of Helium-3. You get the He3 out of the dust by heating it. The He3 was produced by the bombardment of cosmic radiation, and it is likely of high value in (clean) fusion nuclear reactions.
There are likely few other minerals in recoverable quantity on the Moon, because it lacks water, which tends to concentrate minerals and metals.
Asteroids, on the other hand, can be very dense with valuable metals, such as in the platinum group. One Near Earth Object, called 433 Eros, is about the size of Manhattan, but is believe to contain as much platinum group metals as the entire crust of the Earth.
This means ruthenium ($58/oz), rhodium ($1,240/oz), palladium ($804/oz), osmium ($400/oz), iridium ($560/oz), and platinum ($1,238/oz).
Right now, even these values are not enough to make asteroid mining economical. However, many of these metals are almost played out of their known reserves on Earth, so their values may skyrocket.
—all interesting conjecture about “mining in space” would have to face up to the fact that it still would be more cost effective to extract almost anything from sea water (where virtually every element is available) than to “mine” it in space—
Good thinking. I hadn’t thought of that. Extraterrestrial mining probably won’t be a reasonable project until man has established a very big presence in space a long way from Earth.
There are already scads of diamonds - De Beers sits on mountains of them to keep the price artificially high. I read somewhere if they released all their diamonds, the vlaue would be zip.
Tap a massive new source for highly valuable metals, and they won’t be highly valuable for very long.
Hell. I’d pay good money for just a simple rock from the Moon.
That would really be a valuable commodity in itself. More so than Diamonds, in my opinion!
One of the ideas I’ve seen for mars is printing habitation structures with martian concrete using the abundant sulfur to bond it together. (Sulfur has a low melting point.)
What about the delightful “rotten egg” aroma?
Also, when it comes to gold, keep in mind that the more of it you find, the less it is worth. Gold has been pretty stable since we discovered most of the exploitable gold on Earth by the end of the 19th century. Open up a bunch of mines on other planets, and it would lose stability again.
That’s why we’ll look for “unubtanium” instead!
I’m guessing it would be an outer shell and sealed over
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