
Mining the Sky - raleighm
https://logicmag.io/04-mining-the-sky/
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marktangotango
A lot of people assume material from space only has value when brought back
down earths gravity well. This is short sighted and naive imo. The real value
is in building space based industry and settlements ie O’neil cylinders. It
maybe true that a gravity well is necessary for some industrial processes.
This why low gravity bodies like the Moon and Mars are important.

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aetherson
Whether Earthlike conditions are _necessary_ for industrial processes is
beside the point. Nobody knows how to do any industrial process in space and
there is sharply limited demand for space industry right now.

Maybe if we get a lively asteroid mining industry going, that will generate
demand for other industries in space. Trying to get everything going all at
once takes an already insanely difficult project and layers orders of
magnitude more complexity on it before payoff.

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Robotbeat
> Nobody knows how to do any industrial process in space...

False. Don’t conflate your own ignorance with that of others. There’s an
enormous body of literature on in situ resource utilization and in situ
manufacturing, including countless lab-scale demos of industrial processes and
some also demonstrated in space (for instance, ISS relies on electrolysis for
oxygen production and also produces methane with the Sabatier Reaction to
recover some of the oxygen as well). Just check out ntrs.nasa.gov for some
examples.

There are way too many processes to name here.

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aetherson
Oh god. Did you just suggest electrolysis as the kind of exciting industry
that we know how to do in space?

In second grade, I assembled some equipment to do electrolysis. This does not
make me a captain of industry.

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detritus
I'm with you here - I'm really not sure how a load of lab studies [in a
gravity well], theoretical papers [also in a gravity well] and some fairly
predictable processes in low gravity equate to humanity's 'knowing' how to
'do' a wide range of heavy industrial processes that haven't, for the very
most part, ever even been attempted.

I have a fairly hands on job in many ways - one that allows me to explore and
develop techniques - so whilst I can often envisage solutions in advance, I'd
think it absolute hubris to claim I 'know' much until I've actually done it
and proven it.

As far as I'm aware, I can't think of anything in even the light industrial
range of development that's actually been tried in orbit or low gravity, off-
surface.

Certainly not enough to deserve being smeared by accusations of ignorance... .

\- ed

I suppose construction of the ISS from pre-made components might qualify as
'light industrial'.

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Robotbeat
It's pretty simple, actually. You put the process you developed in a
centrifuge if it doesn't work in microgravity. Much of the life support (and
water recovery) system on ISS (which is just a large collection of several
industrial processes) uses centrifuges for this purpose.

~~~
detritus
You make it sound so easy!

Consider a 'simple' example — what might the effect be of a high speed, high
mass 'drilling widget' be in such a body? Not much, probably, at least in the
very short term.

Cumulatively though? A device weighing a few hundred KG, rotating at a few
thousand RPM for a few hours or days or weeks at a time?

What effect do you think that might have on your 'quite simple' centripetal
environment, floating as it is in zero g?

Sure, it can be accounted for — but it's not 'pretty simple, actually'.
Anything but.

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jeffreyrogers
> Luxembourg is very bullish on asteroid mining. They think it’s gonna be a
> huge business five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now.

That timeline seems comically bullish. What's the biggest thing we've brought
back to earth on an unmanned mission to date? Probably a few grams of asteroid
dust. That timeline is maybe right for autonomous cars, but I doubt we'll see
mining on an economically significant level in any of our lifetimes. It just
doesn't make sense from a cost perspective when we have plenty of resources on
earth that can still be extracted. I guess you can make a case for doing it to
learn how to build things in space, but again, the engineering hurdles are
huge, so no way that's going to matter any time soon.

~~~
Someone
The Soviet Union brought back about 300 grams of lunar material in the ‘70s
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock#Unmanned_sample_retu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock#Unmanned_sample_returns))

Still not much, but quite a bit more than a few grams.

~~~
Latteland
And the us brought back 842 lbs of moon rocks according to wikipedia.

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akshayB
Unless they master some sort of hive/swam worker architecture which works in
an autonomous way the timeline seems very aggressive. Sending humans to space
that far out on asteroids can be super expensive project to get materials
available on earth.

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gregknicholson
> there’s a lot of money to be made in making outer space safe for extractive
> capitalism.

> There are only so many sovereign countries. Luxembourg is one of them. And
> throughout its history, it has survived by making laws that businesses want.
> It’s as though lobbyists write their legislation. In fact, sometimes they
> do.

> It’s going to look like the extractive industries on earth. It’s going to be
> a repeat of what we're seeing in Congo. Now, one big difference is that
> there aren’t any humans to suffer human rights abuses up in space, so that’s
> good.

It's frank, I'll give it that.

Hooray for the future...!

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madeuptempacct
Does all this space mining talk refer to the asteroid belt past Mars?

Or are there other sources?

