[ExI] Space Mining

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 1:40 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> I also note the subject line of this email.  In addition to asteroid mining, there is the potential for lunar mining.

Lunar regolith is about 1% metal.  This means you have to sort through
100 times as much material as you would with a metal asteroid.  It's
possible to make metals, glass, and other things out of regolith, but
it is complex and takes a lot of energy and equipment.  O'Neill
proposed to use a mass driver to get unsorted regolith off the moon
and process it in space where you have full-time sunlight for energy.
The leftover material would be used as shielding.  There is a vast
trove of information on these subjects in the early Space
Manufacturing Conference papers.

> I suspect that lunar mining mostly makes sense to support lunar manufacturing.  (While there is the prospect of mining helium-3, that is of no great value until after, not before, helium-3 fusion is demonstrated and becomes ready, with the possible sole exception of the fuel source, for commercial deployment.)  This begs the question of what to manufacture on the Moon that could be of significant value; the best answer I have found so far is solar panels for power satellites, and/or entire solar power satellites, to be built and launched into Earth orbit at much lower cost than building and launching from Earth's surface into orbit.

I am not very impressed with solar panels.  You can make twice as much
power per unit area using thermal cycles.  This reduces the amount of
reaction mass you have to expend for station keeping against light
pressure.

Making turbines on the moon should not be any more difficult than
making solar panels.

But it is not clear to me that we will ever do much with the moon.  It
is going to take 15 years or more and by that time who knows what the
technological base will look like?

Keith
> On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 11:38 AM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think I have mentioned this before https://htyp.org/Mining_Asteroids
>>
>> "This article provides a rough analysis of mining an asteroid for gold
>> and other high-value elements (platinum group metals) for return to an
>> Earth market. Given serious bootstrapping at an asteroid and the
>> development of low-cost transport to GEO in the context of a power
>> satellite or similar very large operations in space, it appears an
>> asteroid-mining project could make money beyond the wildest dreams of
>> avarice."
>>
>> 12 years ago.
>>
>> I should update it.
>>
>> Keith
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 5:21 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
>> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > There are firms trying to make it happen today.  Even I have developed a bit of relevant tech.  The main barrier is, of course, the continued high cost of launching hardware to survey and then to mine.
>> >
>> > On Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 4:15 AM Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> So nearby they are reopening a gold mine using cyanide to bleach the
>> >> miniscule amounts of gold out of the ore in open top but lined pits.
>> >> As I think through whether this is a good or bad thing for our part of
>> >> the country, I wonder when does the EXL community think asteroid
>> >> mining might actually start to happen.
>> >>
>> >> Personally, I can't imagine it being more than 24 years out, the
>> >> lifespan of this locally proposed mine.
>> >>
>> >> -Kelly
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