I understand all things are relative, but isn't the most expensive part of space travel escaping gravity to get from ground to LEO? Parking a mineral rich rock in orbit would still require lifting dump trucks up to the orbiting rock just to have them return with their loads.
Might as well plan a controlled re-entry of the rock to the surface. Drop it into the desert somewhere, then go mine it on the surface.
"Might as well plan a controlled re-entry of the rock to the surface. Drop it into the desert somewhere, then go mine it on the surface."
Any commercially-viable amount of rock dropped from orbit into the desert would probably hit with enough force to cause a second K-Pg extinction event. Even if it hit the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we'd be horribly screwed. The amount/cost of fuel needed to control the descent of any commercially-viable quantity of rock would probably outpace the mineral value itself.
You should be able to make some kind of primitive parachute. Not that makes a soft landing, but where it only crashes with moderate speed.
You do touch on a very important issue: Anyone who can move an asteroid to Earth can also extinguish at least a city at will. I foresee this business being very heavily regulated by the big military powers.
Any commercially-viable asteroid would need to be at least a mile in some dimension or another to have enough minable material. Let's assume 3200 Phaethon was our target - three mile wide asteroid, mass of 140 x 10^12 Kg.
I'll let you do the math, but just the 10^12 kg along should tell you that the idea is quite infeasible before you ever get to doing the actual calculation.
BTW it's easier to just do (KE) = 1/2mv^2 as your calculating formula.
> I'll let you do the math, but just the 10^12 kg along should tell you that the idea is quite infeasible before you ever get to doing the actual calculation.
Did you try the math?
10^12 J (i.e., 10^12 kg moving slowly) is a lot, but it’s not an extinction-level event. 4 x 10^12 J is 1 kiloton of TNT equivalent. A big boom, but if well placed...
How much energy are you going to expend to ensure that hundred-trillion+ kilogram rock can fall at the rate desired by the prior positor? Half a kilometer a second is supersonic speed. We get 1.3E+19 J now as the energy level we need to fight against. That's higher than a 100 megaton nuke by two orders of magnitude. Now fight against that every second! Don't forget to calculate the pull of gravity as well! There's still more numbers to pop into the equation!
We don't have the energy capacity to begin with. The rock would smash into us, and we'd die.
Nice goalposting there. My issue was only with your implication that the mass alone was enough.
Obviously impact speed matters too, that was the point.
I assume your 500m/s comes from the assumed algebra in my post, but the real issue is the gravitational potential energy as you allude to.
To get that rock from 2000km up (low earth orbit) to the surface means somehow dissipating 10^21 J -- two orders of magnitude higher still than your claim.
I like that other poster's idea of a "giant parachute". I hope it's made of 4000% heat shields.
Maybe we can cover it with wind turbines and power the entire US for a year. [0]
"I assume your 500m/s comes from the assumed algebra in my post"
I assume you didn't even READ my post, as the very first sentence is "How much energy are you going to expend to ensure that hundred-trillion+ kilogram rock can fall at the rate desired by the prior positor?" Key words - AT THE RATE DESIRED BY THE PRIOR POSITOR - as in the person who I was originally responding to in this thread, and not you.
Since you did not read my post and obviously didn't read theirs, I'm not entertaining yours. You lack the required information to make a useful contribution to this thread.
> Since you did not read my post and obviously didn't read theirs, I'm not entertaining yours. You lack the required information to make a useful contribution to this thread.
Apologies for misunderstanding what “the prior positor” meant (did you mean “poster”?) — but wow I have to say your angry response seems highly disproportionate to my misinterpreting a typo of yours.
As you yourself lack the required humanity or empathy to make it worth having a conversation, I guess we’re both done.
I don't show humanity to people that don't act human off the bat. You invoked the golden rule with your condescension and lack of empathy in your statements. I'm merely returning the attitude which was presented to me.
No they won't. Even if you get as big as this one the article is talking about to be full of gold and drop it directly in backyard of a gold smelting factory it will barely make a dent in the price of gold. Plus our entire technology is based on using silver and gold for circuitry, so it will get absorbed really fast in the market. Currently we have so much of a shortage that we recycle old boards to extract the metals in them.
All of the gold that has ever been mined by humanity over the last few thousand years would fit in a cube about 21 meters per edge. So I think that actually it would make a big difference to grab something this size made out of gold.
I wonder what the best way to sell that would be? Maybe just slowly release it and use the asset as security on loans. That way you maintain the high price and get access to capital.
> Even if you get as big as this one the article is talking about to be full of gold and drop it directly in backyard of a gold smelting factory it will barely make a dent in the price of gold.
I'm not so sure: The price of gold depends on an estimate of future supply. If a company can successfully mine an asteroid for 5 grams of gold in 2025, many people will be worried about a massive increase in gold supply over the next 50 or 100 years. They would then dump their existing holdings of gold and crash the price.
The trick is to drop it by several gold smelting factories, so one one gets a monopoly.
In reality, some entity will get the first metal asteroid, and have a monopoly for a while. But only a while.
I don't understand your arguments for no price drop. To me the facts are simple: Price is set by supply and demand. When supply increases by 10x or 100x, prices will fall dramatically.
Depends on the metal. For certain platinum-group metals (iridium, osmium), a single asteroid might contain several years' or decades' production. For more common metals like iron, copper, or even gold, it wouldn't make a dent in the market.
