Private space missions weighed

Pasadena Star-News ^ | 07/16/05 | Kimm Groshong

[Prime Choice]

NASA was selling vacation flights?

NASA is a science and research agency. Do you expect the Department of the Treasury to offer vacation tours?

[AntiGuv]

The asteroids are chump change. Mars and Venus are the motherlodes!!

[Drammach]

The asteroids are chump change. Mars and Venus are the motherlodes!!

Maybe in some sense, but when it comes down to energy and work investment, the asteroids will be more economical / profitable..
The asteroids are already broken up into smaller pieces..
That makes it easier to check for precious metals composition, and for extraction of same..
Also, no gravity well to fight.. The only energy expended to move your cargo will be overcoming inertia...

[AntiGuv]

But asteroids can't be terraformed! ;^)

[Drammach]

Terraformed?

You mean "made habitable" ?
I beg to differ.

Asteroids could be moved into orbit closer to the sun, ( within the "habitable sphere" )..
Domed enclosures could provide "green space", and living / business quarters could be created within the asteroid..
Some may even come with their own water-ice..

Granted, you won't have much gravity, but once they are mined out, all those corridors could be sealed and used for living quarters, storage, etc...
You could even pump water into them, and let it freeze, and use them for water depots..

Chances are, the first permanent stations for Mars will be on Diemos or Phobos, which are little more than asteroids..
I think we will find that asteroids are far more useful to us than the planets are..

Not that we won't end up colonizing Mars, or even terraforming it..
I would guess we will spend a lot of time effort and money trying to do just that..
I'm just not sure it will pay off in the long run..

We can mine metals and other elements from asteroids and build our own space stations, provide them with "spin" and produce an acceptable gravity, and be much better off in space.. without the gravity well to fight every time we wish to go to another planet..
I think the only thing to really travel to and from the planets will be People.. not goods..
We will get all our materials in space, from space, and will use it their..
Very little of that product will ever go to the planets..

[cripplecreek]

I think that we'll find that the asteroids will contain a much more pure source of metals.

[Balding_Eagle]

My original point was this: Private enterprise is far superior to Government enterprise in nearly all endeavors.

Space exploration is just the latest example. Within months of the first privately funded space flight someone in private enterprise figured out a way to generate a stream of income from it.

As you pointed out earlier, it's been 40 years since NASA went into space, 35 years since they landed on the moon. Since then I've had grandkids. What do they have to look forward to space wise? The very same thing I did when I was a kid, they can look forward to man walking on the moon.

NASA has gone nowhere. NASA is going nowhere.

NASA is the space equivalent of the Post Office. We've had highly paid, highly trained Post Office workers in charge of our space program. It shows.

It’s time to turn at least part of the potential of space to those who will do the most with it, private enterprise.

[Prime Choice]

My original point was this: Private enterprise is far superior to Government enterprise in nearly all endeavors.

Like it or not, nobody's stopping free enterprise from getting into the mix. Did you even notice that it is the government trying to entice private enterprise to get into it? Huh?

But so far all we have NO businesses getting into the race; just a handful of folks with a buttload of dispensible cash.

Again: NASA is not stopping private enterprise from going into space. You can drop that yarn right now. The bottom line is that American business doesn't see any short-term profits in going into outer space and thus they will not pursue it because they know it is (A) high risk, (B) very expensive, and (C) is typically centered around pure research.

As for NASA not going to the moon again, the American public has no-one to blame but themselves. They lost interest after Apollo 12 and were only briefly re-engaged following the drama of Apollo 13. By Apollo 17, it was over. Nobody was interested anymore because NASA made it look "easy."

And lo...funding was cut by Congress. And you think NASA should have just kept doing what it was doing for free or something? Get real.

[Southack]

"Whoop-dee-doo. NASA did that over 40 years ago. Am I supposed to get excited about some private venture only recently accomplishing it? Let me know when those oh-so-ballyhoo'd private ventures land on the moon. Then we'll talk."

Rutan's civilian Space flights were innovative, even if they treaded on old ground, in much the same way that a more fuel efficient car can be innovative even though it takes the same amount of time to follow the same roads as lesser cars.

For instance, Rutan's entire Spaceship venture, including support aircraft, ground facilities, and the reuseable spacecraft itself, cost less than $20 million. He can now make copies of those spacecraft at even lower costs for private buyers.

The engine that he used burned an environmentally-friendly fuel...which costs far less to reach Space than traditional toxic fuels.

He also changed the paradigm. SpaceShipOne was lifted to 50,000 feet by a mothership, saving large amounts of rocket fuel and money.

Likewise his re-entry didn't require fragile tiles ala the Space Shuttle (though this final point may be only because of his reduced speeds).

And now he's scaling that design up...which is another cool and clever thing to do. Rather than start over from scratch (e.g. Apollo to Space Shuttle), he's taking a proven concept and expanding it.

Oh, by the way, at least one private satellite has orbited our Moon (in the past ten years).

[Prime Choice]

Rutan's civilian Space flights were innovative, even if they treaded on old ground

Rutan only went so high because he stood on the shoulders of NASA engineers who turned science fiction to science reality in 8 short years with 1960s hardware. It's 40 years later and Rutan's hardly done anything spectacular except burn his own cash to cover ground that wouldn't have got a mention on page 14 of the Weekly Picayune had NASA done it.

[Prime Choice]

Oh, by the way, at least one private satellite has orbited our Moon (in the past ten years).

With how many humans aboard?

Nyack. Try again.

[Drammach]

Of all the meteorites examined, 92.8 percent are composed of silicate (stone), and 5.7 percent are composed of iron and nickel; the rest are a mixture of the three materials. Stony meteorites are the hardest to identify since they look very much like terrestrial rocks.

Carbon: (C-type),Carbon over 75 percent...Albedo: 0.03-0.09, (Very dark)
Silicate: (S-type) Metallic iron mixed with iron-silicates and magnesium-silicates, 17 percent... Albedo: 0.10 -0.22 (Relatively bright)
Metallic: (M-type) Iron/ nickel, less than 7 percent....Albedo: 0.10-0.18 (Relatively bright)
Dark: (D-type) Water ice/frozen carbon monoxide mixed with rock less than 1 percent.....Albedo: 0.05 (Relatively dark and reddish)

As you can see from the information above, finding metals, much less pure metals will be difficult, as very little material is of the metal type, most of that being nickel-iron...
While that type of asteroid will probably be the most "valuable", the type we are going to have to learn to work with is the "silicon" or stony type of asteroid...

We will have to learn how to most effectively, and efficiently, mine, process and form that material into the structural materials that we need..
Likewise, we have a limited supply..
The total mass of all the asteroids in our system is estimated to be only half the mass of our moon..

The more we know, the more we know we don't know..
We DO know there is quite a bit of titanium, magnesium, and aluminum ( oxides ) on the moon..
We are learning what elements are available on Mars..
We may still have to enter those "gravity wells" to gain access to certain metals and minerals..
It seems that is where those heavier metals and minerals precipitated during the formation of the planets, and they will be fairly rare in space..

As AntiGuv pointed out, our source for the heavier metals may, indeed, be the planet Venus, or even Mercury..