Asteroid Mining | A nearby future
Casually reading this article on a device i.e. way more powerful than the computer used in Apollo 11. This progress and all other technological advancements which you take for granted are built on few rare and precious metals like Terbium, Neodymium or Tantalum. Getting these rare materials from ground and fitting into your device is ugly. Mining Industry for air, water and land pollution. Today, these chemicals like cyanide, sulphuric acid and chlorine are used which harm biodiversity, workers and locals. And rare resources are also political tool, when countries restrict access to them. But if we replace mining industry with a clean source which won't harm anyone, at least not Earth. Yes, we can, all we need to do is to look up.
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Is Asteroid Mining worth the hype?
Asteroids are millions and trillions of tons of rocks, metals and ice. Leftovers from the cloud that became the planet 4.5 billion years ago. They can be as small as a meter or proto planets as large as a country. Most of them are concentrated in the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. While hundreds of thousands more do their own things between the place. As space travel is becoming less expensive, scientists and economists have begun looking into these rocks. Even relatively small metallic asteroids have trillions of dollars’ worth of industrial and precious metals like platinum. And bigger asteroid like 16 Psyche could contain enough iron nickel to cover the world's metal needs for millions of years. At current market prices the rare materials would be worth quadrillions of dollars. Well, not really. But technically. For instance, there are more than 20 million tons of gold in the ocean's water worth roughly 750 trillion US dollars. But filtering out the gold from ocean would cost more than its selling price. Asteroid mining has exactly the same problem. It's just too expensive to replace mining on Earth. Billions of dollars’ worth of valuable resources in the space are worthless if it takes trillions of dollars to get them. What makes it so hard?
Technology Requirements
The principal behind asteroid mining is simple. The basic idea is to choose an asteroid and move it to a place where it is feasible to process, and then take it apart to turn it into useful products humans need.
Unfortunately, all of this collides with the fundamental problems, humans have yet to solve. Going to space is expensive. It cost thousands of dollars in rocket fuel for each kilogram, just to reach the low earth orbit. Going further into deep space costs thousands more. We need cheaper space travel to make asteroid mining feasible. One solution is to shift from classical to electrical. We already use electrical rocket engines for many of the space probes on science missions. In principal, we need only to make bigger one. While electrical engines are not powerful enough to fly to space, they require only a tiny amount of fuel to go very far once they're in space. This means we don't need to spend a lot of money on fuel only to transport fuel into space. This doesn't solve the whole cost problem but it makes easier to start our first mission.
How it would look like if we start Asteroid mining
Now that we have an electrical engine spaceship, we need to find the right asteroid and get it here. We have already successfully visited asteroids with space probes and even collected their samples. Still, to make it easier and cheaper our first targets will probably be near earth asteroids. Asteroids that orbit near our Earth. After a few months of travel, our spaceship finally arrives at an asteroid. The first thing that needs to be done is to secure the asteroid and stops it form spinning. There are multiple ways to do it like vaporizing material with a laser or stopping the rotation with thrusters. Once we have a stable asteroid, we need to wait. Orbital mechanics are very complicated but if you push something in the right direction at exactly at the right moment, you can move very big things with very little force. So, we wait for exactly the right moment. Our ships fire its thruster sand nudges the asteroid into a trajectory that takes it near the moon. The moon is useful because we can borrow its gravitational pull to put asteroid into a stable orbit around Earth which saves more fuel. Of course, it will take more months. But all the time since our ship was launched has not been wasted.
How it will began
The first space mining and processing equipment has been installed in orbit, and is now carefully moving towards the asteroid. The processor works very differently than on Earth. Giant mirrors focus sunlight and heat up asteroid rock to boil out the gases. Grinders break up the dried rocks into gravel and dust and centrifuges separate dense from light elements. Even if we only extract 0.01% of the asteroid's mass, this is still several times more than you would get from the same amount from ore on the Earth. But what now? How do we get our precious metals safely back to Earth? There are a few ways like loading it into reusable rockets that return to Earth from space. Heat shilled capsules filled with gas bubbles. These can just be dropped into the ocean where ships can tow them away.
So what's next
This could be the starting of humanity's first real step towards colonizing the solar system. As our technology and experience grows, our missions to get more and more sophisticated. Parts and fuel produced on asteroids don't have to be launched from Earth at all. The first mining operation makes the second one easier and so on. While the space industries grow, the precious metals get cheaper, eventually we could stop mining on Earth. Even the idea of mining on Earth might become something weird like having an open fire in your living room. Landscapes ravaged by pollution will heal, while technological wonders we are used to get cheaper and less toxic to make. None of this are science fiction, we don't need fancy materials or new physics to make asteroid mining a possibility. We can start working on future from today. All we need is initial push!
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