Posted on 05/25/2017 10:52:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
It could be used as an umbrella to stop global warming!................
Ya mean like BIGLY...I mean BIG LEAGUE huge?
Bringing all that mass to earth will cause the gravitational attraction of the sun to increase and thus produce cooling.
Asteroid capture is the certain care for global warming
LOL! You have got it! BIGLY, BIG LEAGUE, YEWG! Big time BOOM! It will be a BLMOAB: Big League Mother Of All Bombs. Today’s Yoga: practice my duck and cover under the desk.
Think bigger! That's much less we have to transport INTO space. That much iron and nickel would sustain development operations in near-Earth orbit and wouldn't have to be tugged into space in the first place.
The initial investment required would be high, but once the mining, refining, and development infrastructure are in place, they could build space ports, space planes, orbital habitats, satellites, etc.
That’s a pretty small payload. Put it near L1 or L2 Lagrange point, and it’s close enough to mine but not close enough to present a threat to any low-Earth orbit satellites.
It would be little threat to Earth or our moon. We would control the insertion burns, and I can tell you that the math, while insanely complex, is pretty solid.
“The law of supply and demand applies. If you flood the market with a billion tons of high quality ore, the price will go down to near nothing.”
On the other hand, having the cost of iron, nickel, copper, titanium, gold, and silver drop to near nothing would be a tremendous economic boost. Want to build a space city? Spin it for ‘gravity’ and give it really thick walls? No problem.
The production costs vs expected returns is what makes it uneconomical.
Based on my own calculations, referring to the law of supply and demand and based on projected future market prices should such a new supply become available, I estimate the asteroid (and all other iron and nickel) to be worth approximately $1.32. However I could be off by up to $1.
Hire Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Willis to steal it.
Drag a gigantic asteroid near the Earth? What could possibly go wrong?
The iron isn’t worth all that much, scrap prices here are about 3 cents a pound...................
They could put it in an orbit just outside earth’s orbit by a million miles or thereabouts.
Then Earth would pass it every year or so...................
Absolutely. If we're going to survive as a species, we're going to have to make use of the resources the Lord placed in our immediate neighborhood. Sadly, the biggest problem with actually exploiting these resources, other than the technical issues of doing the actual work of course, is that there is currently a treaty signed on to by most nations that says that these resources are the property of "mankind" or some such blather. The idea being that any profits would have to be divided amongst the various and sundry nations of the earth, not the people who actually take the risk and harness the resources. It's similar to the Law of the Sea treaty that we (the U.S. still hasn't signed onto yet. The Law of Space treaty will destroy any attempt to gather the resources of the asteroids, at least until it is done away with.
We could easily end the practice of 'strip mining' on this planet if we brought one of these mineral rich asteroids into a lunar orbit (I wouldn't recommend a solar orbit for obvious reasons). The Lagrange points would probably be good choices as well. Of course, the "environmentalists" will never sign on for this, because what they are really opposed to is capitalism.
Imagine how cheap iron will be when there is an asteroid of this size filled to the rim being mined! Basically that market will collapse. Meaning the mining will stop because it’s economically not worth it. Then price will rise until mining operations are sustainable and then fall until they are right on the edge. Then you have equiibrium and prices will stabilize. Low, low, low!
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