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ironically the easiest way to get minerals from the asteroid belt would be attaching a space drogue chute to asteroids and crashing them into earth
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Jan 13, 2019 18:23
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are there asteroids with worthwile amounts of fissile material? quickly googling seems to net people assuming away the problem of how the fissile material gets there or just hoping for nuclear fusion, so i'm suspecting the answer is no or we don't know or itd be more expensive to set up a uranium mining operation in the asteroid belt than it is on the crust of a planet or something the waste heat thing is something that never crossed my lil brain, what effects would massive thermal pollution in space have? i mean i could handwave it away by saying 'space is big just go somewhere empty to set up your next robofactory and if you need a trillion square miles of solar panels, gently caress it' but i assume there's more to it? oystertoadfish has issued a correction as of 18:26 on Jan 13, 2019 |
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Jan 13, 2019 18:24
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love too write asteroid mining fanfiction instead of addressing overconsumption in the developed world
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Jan 13, 2019 18:26
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space mining is not going to happen until we invent something like the antimatter reactors from star trek at which point you have so much loving energy whats the point of mining
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Jan 13, 2019 18:27
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the silicon valley people are starting to try to figure out the asteroid bullshit so maybe we're writing fanfiction about the poo poo they'll get up to i wrote a one line fan fiction piece about grey goo and peter thiel's face
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Jan 13, 2019 18:28
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oystertoadfish posted:the waste heat thing is something that never crossed my lil brain, what effects would massive thermal pollution in space have? absolutely none. but you need to make sure your poo poo doesn't melt.
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Jan 13, 2019 18:32
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overconsumption is code for impoverishing the poor further
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Jan 13, 2019 18:32
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yeah there's pretty much nothing up in space that we can't get a lot cheaper and easier here the only reason to go to the asteroids is to infect them too with humanity, which is probably reason enough tbh that we'll do it unless we cook ourselves to death first
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Jan 13, 2019 18:33
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are there even elements we're running low on earth other than helium
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Jan 13, 2019 18:33
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more radiators! more solar panels. more more more i guess this is the point where the logic says it costs more to build this poo poo than you're getting out of it
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Jan 13, 2019 18:33
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Prav posted:some space nerd tell me the logistics for getting minerals from the main belt to earth surface in an economically useful form because that seems daunting You don't. Well, maybe you send some of the precious metals back for electronics manufacturing or whatever, but the iron and silicates get used to build habitats not far from where you're mining. That's what The High Frontier that was linked a couple posts before yours is about. It's far-off fully automated gay luxury space communism stuff, not anything we'll see in our lifetimes.
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Jan 13, 2019 18:49
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Raskolnikov38 posted:are there even elements we're running low on earth other than helium i couldn't find anything online, but i had a chemistry teacher in high school who claimed to be part of some kind of helium conservation society she also lived in a log cabin with no running water and i'm pretty sure she smoked lots of weed. one of the best teachers i ever had
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Jan 13, 2019 19:15
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Has anybody actually played the High Frontier game because just looking through the material I can find for free online this seems like EXTREMELY my thing if I can ever wrap my head around the rulebook but also an utterly impenetrable "game" that no human has ever actually managed to play for fun. Much less a group of multiple people.
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Jan 13, 2019 19:37
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Raskolnikov38 posted:are there even elements we're running low on earth other than helium Depends on how everyone feels about ripping the planet apart. Most of the good poo poo sank to the core/mantle so finding random hunks of rocks out in space that can completely crash the rare minerals markets would be nice. There's a lot of cool poo poo we could do if certain materials weren't hundreds or thousands of dollars an ounce. Prav posted:how would you generate the energy for smelting? you'd need some pretty big solar panels to run a furnace You nailed it. Fusion plants would be nice too, but unless you're past the asteroid belt or in something that needs to be compact/mobile (ships) then I doubt it would be worth it. e: Fission is actually fine and pretty doable, but a bit of a pita. Marxalot has issued a correction as of 20:03 on Jan 13, 2019 |
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Jan 13, 2019 19:39
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Yeah the problem isn't getting the energy the problem is heat dissipation.
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Jan 13, 2019 19:56
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My boy john Ringo wrote a whole series of books about one weird trick to use solar mirrors to melt asteroids, and more specifically to use centripetal force to force all the metals out and keep a mostly silica core to make more mirrors with. Anyway even in his book the only reason it works is because he buys magic space technology from Venetian style space aliens because he magically found something they could sell on earth
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Jan 13, 2019 20:02
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Prav posted:some space nerd tell me the logistics for getting minerals from the main belt to earth surface in an economically useful form because that seems daunting Landing's the easy part, just slap some parachutes and a small guidance rocket or w/e on it It's the moving it from the asteroid belt to earth orbit that sucks
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Jan 13, 2019 20:14
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Raskolnikov38 posted:are there even elements we're running low on earth other than helium Rare earth metals for electronics
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Jan 13, 2019 20:16
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We're running out of phosphates I think. Space won't help with that though lol
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Jan 13, 2019 20:27
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i was trying to figure out what future tech bros can mine after the asteroids get boring, and i decided that somebody's gonna try to mine the sun obviously im never gonna come up with a new idea. google taught me it's called star lifting and you pretty much have to have a dyson sphere around the thing before you can get enough energy to go down there and scoop the hydrogen edit: or make the hydrogen come up to you, seems to be the preferred method bet you could still raise some venture capital for sun mining tho. lifting stellar mass, if you wanna be boring about it oystertoadfish has issued a correction as of 20:36 on Jan 13, 2019 |
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Jan 13, 2019 20:34
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Well the inventor of communication satellites outlined a plan to condense Jupiter into a small star, so that’s what I’m getting VC funding to do.
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Jan 13, 2019 20:36
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oystertoadfish posted:i was trying to figure out what future tech bros can mine after the asteroids get boring, and i decided that somebody's gonna try to mine the sun I read a book that featured a civilization mining from a white dwarf and having to be careful because the more mass they extracted the more like it was to go Nova and flare back up to a red giant
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Jan 13, 2019 20:39
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Trabisnikof posted:Well the inventor of communication satellites outlined a plan to condense Jupiter into a small star, so that’s what I’m getting VC funding to do. 
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Jan 13, 2019 20:51
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Mayor Dave posted:Landing's the easy part, just slap some parachutes and a small guidance rocket or w/e on it mineral production is generally measured in kilotons. that's a lot of parachutes
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Jan 13, 2019 20:57
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Prav posted:mineral production is generally measured in kilotons. that's a lot of parachutes Oh yeah, I shouldn't have implied that it would actually be easy to do at scale, only that we already know how to do it in theory Boosting it from the belt to a safe.eaeth orbit and processing the materials in space are things we really don't have a good idea for yet
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Jan 13, 2019 21:02
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I don't really see the asteroid mining thing with current physics. Unless you're gonna use the minerals up in space, almost any kind of hilariously impractical mining here on earth would be cheaper and easier. Even mining at the bottom of the sea would probably be cheaper. Free fall manufacturing maaaaybe, but I dunno if there's currently anything useful that would need that sort of thing, and it would be stupidly expensive to build any kind of at-scale manufacturing in orbit. Vacuum chambers can be built here on earth and even gigantic ones would be cheaper than a space station.
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Jan 13, 2019 21:41
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We go to space because it is cool as heck and also maybe one day there will be an meteor we need to divert. The point of asteroid mining and manufacture in space afaik is to be able to skip the gravity well to get materials up necessary for construction/refueling. You wouldn't need to really be sending stuff down to Earth. The question isn't can we make X cheaper on Earth really it's how expensive is it to get into orbit. If you can just build and launch probes/satellites/etc already in orbit that's huge both from a logistics angle and from the angle of now you can build stuff that doesn't need to survive a rocket blasting it through the atmosphere. From there you can do any number of things; solar power arrays transmitting power down for example. Anchors for space elevators. Anything bigger than what a few rockets can haul is probably going to need some kind of orbital manufacturing infrastructure. Moridin920 has issued a correction as of 23:32 on Jan 13, 2019 |
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Jan 13, 2019 23:23
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current space efforts imo should be focused on satellite based exploration along with a manned presence at MEO or HEO and maybe some trips to the moon
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Jan 13, 2019 23:44
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Probe all the weird moons
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Jan 13, 2019 23:46
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oystertoadfish posted:are there asteroids with worthwile amounts of fissile material? quickly googling seems to net people assuming away the problem of how the fissile material gets there or just hoping for nuclear fusion, so i'm suspecting the answer is no or we don't know or itd be more expensive to set up a uranium mining operation in the asteroid belt than it is on the crust of a planet or something severely doubt there's meaningful amounts of uranium in asteroids. they're mostly made of things earth already has a lot of, like iron, nickel, or ice thermal pollution isn't a meaningful concern in the asteroid belt. the problem is it's hard to cool things in space, because there's no air or anything to use as a medium for thermal exchange, so you have to rely entirely on radiating the heat away
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Jan 13, 2019 23:53
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Trabisnikof posted:Well the inventor of communication satellites outlined a plan to condense Jupiter into a small star, so that’s what I’m getting VC funding to do. Now I am just a simple shitposter, but that seems like it would cause some problems for the rest of the solar system.
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Jan 14, 2019 00:10
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The iss has an app with a live cam that alerts you when it's over daylight so you can watch it if you care
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Jan 14, 2019 00:26
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Main Paineframe posted:the problem is it's hard to cool things in space, because there's no air or anything to use as a medium for thermal exchange, so you have to rely entirely on radiating the heat away thanks for all of that! so this part connects with my current takeaway, that the solution just keeps being 'more', more power, more radiators, more resource intensive poo poo, before you can even start tackling the task of running a no poo poo factory in zero g and ten light minutes or whatever from the nearest human being so at some point, if it's gonna take you a ton of payload and/or unsaleable local materials to build the physical plant required to refine those global economy destroying rare earth metals, maybe it won't be worth it but the possibility of cornering the globe on like cellphone circuitry means I bet people will try!
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Jan 14, 2019 00:30
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Moridin920 posted:We go to space because it is cool as heck and also maybe one day there will be an meteor we need to divert. Yeah but there is no reason for human space flight in the first place other than nerding out about how cool it is, so there's no reason to build infrastructure up there. There's a ton of interesting exploration and observation that can be done but none of it requires human presence. Even on the ISS (which is kind of an embarrassingly useless joke) most of the experiments are almost entirely automated.
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Jan 14, 2019 00:38
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exmarx posted:space fetishism is just a continuation of colonial ideology. like, they don't even try to hide it: Go look at Soviet space agitprop, mate. Even if it's just another manifestation of colonial ideology, dead rocks in space aren't really the first victims to defend. hackbunny posted:Forget about Orion, there was a planned, way more realistic nuclear variant of the Saturn V, with a NERVA third stage. It was a no-brainer evolutionary improvement over the Saturn V and could have landed people on Mars in the 70s, and it was scrapped because of it (politically, it was better not to get another massively expensive manned mission approved) Nuclear chemical prop is not really great. You only get a factor of 3x boost in Isp. Nuclear electric had its hayday with Prometheus and JIMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prometheus. For what it's worth, there was a recent study revisiting Orion though I can't find any public links anymore. Prav posted:how would you generate the energy for smelting? you'd need some pretty big solar panels to run a furnace You send the reactor and a lot of radiators. There were a few recent (last decade) French studies of ~MW space reactors. US/Russia have designed/deployed 1-200 kW reactors. Russian TOPAZ reactors used thermionic conversion, which is pretty clever. They brought the tech to the US around the end of the cold war: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/craddock2/ https://www.scribd.com/document/315081951/Soviet-TOPAZ-Reactor Separately, the biggest space nuclear disaster was a Russian reactor reentering over Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954 TheFluff posted:I don't really see the asteroid mining thing with current physics. Unless you're gonna use the minerals up in space, almost any kind of hilariously impractical mining here on earth would be cheaper and easier. Even mining at the bottom of the sea would probably be cheaper. It's pretty much this. Anyone who's seriously interested in mineral exploitation in-space in the next century is deluded. There's also major issues for its economics and the necessity of establishing cartels to regulate market prices. Like you've spent ~$1T to get your iridium, platinum, etc back to earth. Congrats! You'll have to wait XX years to recoup your investment because you can't flood the market as demand isn't going to magically grow to meet your supply. TheFluff posted:Even on the ISS (which is kind of an embarrassingly useless joke) most of the experiments are almost entirely automated. Regardless of how you feel about its expense, ISS still serves as a good platform for orbital science (earth & space observing) for appropriate payloads. If you want to fly a big X-ray detector and can't afford to make it a standalone mission, it's the place to go. Generally, the cost different might be a factor of ~5x between flying on ISS vs free flyer. A good example: https://www.nasa.gov/nicer. That said, ISS is becoming obsolete in part due to lower cost of access to space (vis a vis new launch vehicles Space X, etc, lower cost to satellite tech, and increasing tolerance of lower maturity hardware), but some payloads will still have a niche. guidoanselmi has issued a correction as of 00:57 on Jan 14, 2019 |
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Jan 14, 2019 00:46
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Yeah until our satellites identify an incoming meteor and we're hosed. IDK it's just not that resource intensive relative to other wasteful purposeless poo poo we do and provides poo poo tons of jobs and education and training for people. What's the point behind anything beyond basic needs? It's not like here have free healthcare or NASA but you can't have both.
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Jan 14, 2019 00:47
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nasa had lots of facilities in the Jim Crow south and i think it recruited from public engineering schools near the facilities, to a large but not preponderant degree sometimes I exaggerate and say that the Jim Crow south won the space race because it's a hot take, but to a lesser degree I think the observation is valid I haven't seen that recent movie basically about this tbh, but it's kind of interesting how pork barrel politics aligned old school nasa with segregation oh and the acceptance of segregation by non southern whites because they don't want to bother their white friends, that's gotta be a factor, it always is in American history. I guess glenn demanded they have one of the ladies in that movie do the math on his flights because she was the best, which is cool, but it's one of those things where a less homogenous ruling class might have pumped the brakes earlier oystertoadfish has issued a correction as of 01:05 on Jan 14, 2019 |
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Jan 14, 2019 01:02
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i thought the point of asteroid mining was for building orbital infrastructure and bigger ships and whatnot. you could save a lot on launch mass if, say, we had a comet captured in earth orbit with some robot refinery filtering all the ammonia and poo poo out
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Jan 14, 2019 01:04
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I have patented a von Neumann machine that will land on asteroids and manufacture dildos which are shot back at the earth stay tuned for my go fund me
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Jan 14, 2019 01:25
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Visited the Deep Space Network in Canberra, Australia yesterday, what large dishes have you seen? https://twitter.com/CanberraDSN/status/1083150838074302464 https://twitter.com/CanberraDSN/status/1083596746213617665
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Jan 14, 2019 01:48
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