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Mining Advantage Extenions
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- AT: Not Technologically Feasible
Mining Advantage Extenions[____] [____] Increasing our ability to avert an asteroid strike will also help us mine their minerals. MJ Sonter, head of Asteroid Enterprises, “The Technical and Economic Feasibility of Mining the Near-Earth Asteroids”, 10/2/1998, http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/the_technical_and_economic_feasibility_of_mining_the_near_earth_asteriods.shtml Conclusions: Advances in asteroid astronomy and discovery rates give confidence that there are many accessible potential orebodies among the Near-Earth Asteroids. Mining and metallurgical options exist that are simple and robust. The use of NPV is crucial in project concept development. A teleoperated miner for return of volatiles from NEAs is economically feasible, using present technology, with an initial market of about 1000 tonnes per year. ---- Asteroid mining is very close to technical and economic feasibility. The technology needed to avert comet or asteroid impact is similar to that needed to recover the essentially unlimited resources contained in these bodies. Thus it is desirable to develop asteroidal resources, both to achieve wanted outcomes (namely space industrialisation, species security, and long term prosperity) and to build the capacity to avert disaster. [____] [____] Further research on asteroids will help us use them for precious metals. Josh Hopkins et. al, engineer in Lockheed Martin's Human Space Flight Advanced Programs, June 2010 “ Plymouth Rock An Early Human Mission to Near Earth Asteroids Using Orion Spacecraft,” http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/ssc/Orion/Toolkit/OrionAsteroidMissionWhitePaperAug2010.pdf Asteroids have long been proposed as potential sources for resource extraction. Volatiles such as water could be gathered for use in space as propellant or life support supplies. Some asteroids are enriched in high-value platinum group metals †† which might be worth the cost of transporting them to Earth if that cost can be reduced in the future. Both the cost of extracting these resources and their value once extracted are still mostly speculative. Human missions to a few asteroids could provide data to determine whether or not asteroid mining may some day be economically viable. Missions to asteroids could determine the abundance of these resources and investigate methods for operating on and near asteroids, including methods for extracting valuable material. Data on the chemical composition and geotechnical characteristics of asteroids would be as useful to engineers as to planetary scientists. AT: Not Technologically Feasible[____] [____] [____] The recent Japanese mission to an asteroid proves that mining is feasible and likely. William Crandall, CEO of Abundant Planet, a company pursuing asteroid mining, 2010, “The Age of Asteroid Mining,” http://www.abundantplanet.org/ First mineral samples: June 2010 The return of the Hayabusa (mission animation; mission overview), bringing mineral samples from near-Earth asteroid (NEA) Itokawa, marks the onset of The Age of Asteroid Mining: Extraterrestrial resource development has begun. Hayabusa faced and overcame many challenges. It successfully returned to Earth on 13 June 2010, plummeting through the atmosphere in a fiery display, and is now scheduled to appear in its own movie. Just as a silken thread, tied to a stone and thrown across a deep gorge, makes it possible to deploy a string, a rope, and eventually a load bearing bridge, the knowledge base that has been created by the JAXA team of engineers will inform all future efforts to mine asteroid mineral wealth. They will forever be the first to have completed the loop: From Earth to asteroid and back. Business opportunities Future NEA sample-return missions are planed by the engineers at JAXA (Hayabusa 2), as well as several other groups in the European Space Agency and at NASA. (NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, launched in September 2007, aims for two main belt asteroids.) Missions to analyze, monitor, respond to, and, if necessary, move potentially hazardous NEAs (PHAs), such as Apophis, have also been planned. One such mission is projected to cost less than $20 million. The Hayabusa mission to Itokawa cost $170 million. To date, over 7,000 NEAs have been identified. Of these, 15% are easier to reach than the moon. New telescopes, such as Pan-STARRS and the LSST (generating “terabytes of data/night”), are expected to detect half a million more (500,000) over the next 15 years. This will significantly increase awareness of both Earth-impact risks and business opportunities. AT: Not Technologically Feasible[____] [____] Asteroid mining is possible and close to feasibility. MJ Sonter, head of Asteroid Enterprises, “The Technical and Economic Feasibility of Mining the Near-Earth Asteroids”, 10/2/98, http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/the_technical_and_economic_feasibility_of_mining_the_near_earth_asteriods.shtml Conclusions: Advances in asteroid astronomy and discovery rates give confidence that there are many accessible potential orebodies among the Near-Earth Asteroids. Mining and metallurgical options exist that are simple and robust. The use of NPV is crucial in project concept development. A teleoperated miner for return of volatiles from NEAs is economically feasible, using present technology, with an initial market of about 1000 tonnes per year. ---- Asteroid mining is very close to technical and economic feasibility. [____] [____] Moving an NEA into orbit is possible with capital investment. Space Studies Institute, 2002, “A Space Roadmap: Mine the Sky, Defend the Earth, Settle the Universe”, http://ssi.org/reading/papers/space-studies-institute-roadmap/ Professor Ed Belbruno of Princeton has discovered a clever technique to return mass from these locations to geostationary orbit for a nominal change in delta V using a lunar resonance capture orbit. Many bodies in these highly accessible earth-crossing orbits will also be easily returnable to geostationary earth orbit. Ed Belbruno has done detailed calculations showing that this is so. NEO’s in halo orbits about the Lagrange points in the Earth sun system are still hypothetical. Nonetheless, if a concerted effort is made to find them, even small ones of the proper composition could be enormously valuable. A metallic asteroid 100 meters in diameter has a mass of roughly eight million tons, this would be sufficient to construct most of the mass of 80 five Gigawatt satellite solar power stations. The research needs here are obvious, how does one move such an asteroid? How does one cut up and maneuver the fragments of metal? How does one formulate the alloys and fabricate the structures? Although there is a large body metallurgical knowledge on hand that has been developed for terrestrial purposes, that knowledge may not be directly translatable to the space environment. We need experiments and we need prototypes, in that order. 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