
School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program - ajoy
https://www.wired.com/story/want-to-learn-how-to-mine-in-space-theres-a-school-for-you/
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arglebarnacle
The courses are being offered online--it's a shame grad classes are too
expensive to just take for fun! Looks like $6,800 or so to take one of the two
they're offering next semester, or about $12,700 for both. The Masters degree
would end up costing you about $58.7k plus $1,000/semester in fees. It's a
hard sell for something that still looks relatively far in the future, but I
suppose if space mining is truly is your dream career, it's great that this
program exists.

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trentmb
It seems that most distance/online masters programs are money mills- there's
an expectation that ones employer will pick up the tab.

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Retric
Excluding organic materials like oil/coal/etc the global economy does not
spend a lot of resources on mining. Further, we have vast excess supply's of
most of what we do mine making space based mining problematic. Sure, it sounds
good but we need to be in space for some other reasons before mining becomes
practical.

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true_tuna
It costs $4k/lb to get something into orbit. Maybe mining for use in space is
the way to go. I hear SpaceX might have some plans to build stuff in space in
the coming years so there might be a ready buyer.

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ianai
That makes anything you can “mine” out of orbit worth at least 4k/lb. pretty
steep incentive for even the most basic resources.

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hamilyon2
With right delta v. I mean, if it is in wildely wrong orbit, than it is no
more useful than same thing on earth.

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twic
Ooh, that's interesting. Commodities trading makes use of contract
specifications which can include the physical location of delivery [1] -
futures for delivery of aluminium to Singapore can be a different price to
those for delivery to New Orleans. Perhaps the contract specifications for
space commodities will name, not particular places, or even orbits, but
delta-V zones. So, the asteroids and the earth-moon L2 point might be in the
same band, because it doesn't take much energy to move between them, but the
surface of the moon and low earth orbit would be different, because, despite
having similar delta-Vs when coming from the asteroids, they are expensive to
move between - at least, according to the map [2].

[1] [https://www.lme.com/Metals/Non-ferrous/Aluminium-
Premiums](https://www.lme.com/Metals/Non-ferrous/Aluminium-Premiums)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/WGOy3qT.png](https://i.imgur.com/WGOy3qT.png)

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brandonmenc
Twenty years ago a high school buddy of mine went to Mines, and he came back
wearing a t-shirt showing (if memory serves) the earth with big drills all
over it and the rest of the planets in the background and the caption read:

"Earth first - we'll get to the other ones later"

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julien_c
I clicked on this link hoping it was the French School of Mines ("Ecole des
Mines").

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novalis78
At this point a reference to the groundbreaking and utterly fascinating
"Mining the Sky" book by John S. Lewis is in order which should be on
everyone's "must read" list.

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slezakattack
I went to South Dakota School of Mines and was sad to learn this wasn't my
school doing this..

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protomyth
I could see SD doing it, but I expected it was Colorado because they always
struck me as having a tinge of the “hold my beer” attitude. They ran a class
in high speed filming of explosions not too long ago. I get the feeling that
the faculty of that place has some stories to tell.

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monocasa
Haha, they actually do have decent aerospace and mining engineering programs.

Their CS program leaves a little to be desired though.

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hexane360
One of their two intro programming classes uses C++.

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monocasa
Can you elaborate? I feel like depending on who you asked, that could be a
point for or a point against.

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hexane360
The class was CSCI261. It used this curriculum:
[http://www.zybooks.com/catalog/programming-in-c-plus-
plus/](http://www.zybooks.com/catalog/programming-in-c-plus-plus/) It was
mainly an elective for non-CS majors, so there was a lot of people with no
experience and no future in programming.

I think it spent way too much time on syntax and minutiae to be a really good
introduction. It spent a really brief time talking about compiled
instructions, stacks, etc. but not really enough to justify C++, imo. It
shoved pointers into a couple days at the end of the semester. A lot of final
questions were things like std::string member functions or construct syntax
(for, switch).

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minikites
>[T]he class covered the Outer Space Treaty, a creation of the United Nations
that governs outer-space actions and (in some people's interpretations) makes
the legality of space mining dubious.

If this topic interests you, there's a whole category at your local library
for Space Law (it's at the end, KZD1002-6715):
[https://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/classification/lcco/lcco_...](https://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/classification/lcco/lcco_k.pdf)

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msandford
There are no governments in space yet so as long as you don't bring the goods
back to earth nobody can really say anything.

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TeMPOraL
As long as you're personally living on Earth, various governments can, and
will, say a lot. Even if you migrate to space permanently, it'll only be a
matter of whether it's worth it to launch something after you.

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Sevii
My EPICS 2 project was on space mining. Mines already had a good amount of
space classes, will have to visit in 2018.

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donutmonger
Mine too! Small world haha.

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rpowers
I think if anyone were to do this, it should be them. Just for their name.

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brettatoms
I wish this was the School of Mimes wanting to launch the first Space Miming
Program.

