[ExI] Mining the Sky SL Talk I gave today

[Adrian Tymes]

--- On Mon, 4/26/10, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> > ...On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
> > 
> > You're mining an asteroid of mostly iron anyway?  Build a 
> > disposable re-entry shell, then nudge the shell into a
> > decaying, Earth-entry orbit...
> 
> Cool idea, especially if we can manage to do the re-entry
> without a control
> system and without a thruster, which would be useless
> without a control
> system.  Then the challenge becomes finding the
> thing.  Without a control
> system, and assuming a re-entry body made entirely from
> on-orbit material
> and assuming reentry by atmospheric decay of the orbit (no
> parachute or
> thrusters available) the uncertainty in landing means it
> could land anywhere
> on the globe.

Ballistics.  The control system and thruster are with the
processing equipment, and return to it afterward.
Basically, just use the same tug that we used to capture
the asteroid in the first place, to give the small piece a
gentle push - precisely timed and angled so that we know
where and when it will come down.  The Apollo missions did
this without thruster or control system on the re-entry
vehicles (unless you count parachutes), and most of them
hit within 10 kilometers of where they were planned to.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashdown_%28spacecraft_landing%29

The unmanned vehicles (a more direct analogue to this
plan) had a larger window - but most of them landed
within a radius of 100 kilometers of their planned
location.  There is easily this much open water over
coastal shelf to the west of Alaska (say, just north of
Saint Paul Island), among other sites.

> an entrepreneur could
> put up the money to recover material from where it is
> useful, to bring it
> here, where it really isn't useful but has monetary value.

Having monetary value gives it a use: to be sold.  More
importantly, that value isn't just because of the "ooh shiny
bauble" factor (though there is some of that), nor just
because it is rare (i.e., in short supply).  Platinum is an
industrially useful metal, especially in a range of
cleantech applications such as fuel cells and catalytic
converters (the things that make auto exhaust less
harmful), not to mention many uses in electronics.  It's
even one of the main subjects for the increasingly serious
research into cold fusion.  A fair case can be made that
merely crashing the platinum market - bringing platinum
prices down to 1/10th or less of today's - would fairly
directly cause greater adoption of environmentally
friendlier technologies, thus improving the environment.
(Remember, crashing that market is an inevitable side effect
of this plan, with effects toward that end likely visible
after harvesting just the first asteroid.)  In short,
platinum is very useful here on Earth, and the supplies
already on Earth are not enough.

Recognizing that, and letting go of the "IT MUST BE IN ORBIT
OR IT IS WORTHLESS" meme, is one of the toughest things for
enthusiasts to do when I have explained this idea.

> If the humans work together and pay taxes, they could
> produce something that
> is wildly useful *to someone else* who didn't pay for
> it.  If the
> entrepreneur is sufficiently competent, she could make the
> venture pay her
> and her investers, but in the process would destroy most of
> the value of the
> natural resource.  The paradox is that the precious
> material is either
> destroyed or never used.  With current technology I
> see no other
> alternatives besides those two.

I see no other alternatives either.  Moreover, the first
option appears to be practically impossible in this case.

You would need to first have a political entity willing
and able to embark on such a mission - and the only such
entities able to do so today, are quite unwilling.  In
theory, one could be convinced; in practice, the
difficulty of doing so, and the resources that would be
needed to give even a slight chance of actually doing
this, are - pardon the pun - astronomical, making this
option impossible in practice.

However, if and after the second option is done
correctly, the difficulty of doing the first may
decrease to the point where it becomes feasible.  It
may also open up other options.  (Indeed, opening them
up might best be an explicit secondary goal: not high
enough priority to interfere with paying off the
investors, so that it won't dissuade said investors
from making this possible in the first place, but
acknowledged so as to get good will from the public
and the space community, so as to reduce the number of
people trying to stop this effort because they see it
as a threat.)

In sum, though, this means the second option appears to
be the only way the first asteroid can be mined, and
there can't be a second or later until there's a first.

> Perhaps we should cross post this discussion to
> PERMANENT?  Samantha, do
> feel free to post my material.  Adrian would be cool
> with it too?

Sure.