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computer parts posted:The cost to extract Aluminum went down. The cost to space mine is not expected to go down. That's the key difference. I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here, but my favorite example of how space technology is not necessarily any more expensive than a lot of more mundane technology is launch vehicles. Currently, of course, they're exorbitantly expensive. What do they cost? The Falcon 9 was about $300 million to develop, plus more for later upgrades. A launch costs $61.2 million. Let's compare this to planes. The Boeing 787 cost $32 billion to develop. One of them costs $220-300 million. An airliner cost a hundred times more to develop than an orbital rocket. It's also far more expensive to buy. What we can take away from this is that space hardware is not necessarily more expensive to develop or build than any other complex technological product. The basic hardware in this case is pretty cheap. It's expensive to use because it's not reusable and it's built in relatively small numbers, but neither of these are insurmountable issues. SpaceX thinks they can slash the costs ten-fold through reusability on the mid term. Longer term, there's room to bring it down to a few hundred thousand for a mid-sized launch before you start running into fuel costs as a limiting factor. It'll still be more expensive than an airline ticket because it takes more energy (and thus fuel) to get to orbit, but it would be far more affordable than it is now. Spaceflight is exorbitantly expensive due to the current state of things. There's no reason to believe it'll be so forever, if we choose to develop the state of the art. Rent-A-Cop posted:Jesus, I don't trust resource companies to build a pipe and then pump oil through it without loving up. If anyone seriously starts considering crashing an asteroid into Earth I hope it's at least NASA and not just some dudes who got venture funding from a crazy California billionaire.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:38
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 12:46 |
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The first thing we'd want to mine is water ice. Ice is basically very valuable fuel ore and it has near term uses in space. Ice gives you propellant, oxidizer, breathing air and consumable water. It's also relatively easy to mine (drill if needed, melt, pump it up) and "refine" (electrolyze it). Your competition would be propellant launched from Earth. This pegs its value as a few thousand dollars per kilogram. It'll go lower if and when launch costs get lower, but that will also lower the costs of starting and expanding your ice mining venture. The old chicken and egg applies here too in that you gotta hope demand goes up with the availability of water. The amount you could sell right now is somewhat limited. The upside is there's a great many plausible uses for water on orbit. Sell everybody propellant for their Mars or Moon missions, top up upper stages to lob probes anywhere in the solar system, with more propellant for longer missions and more science. Delta-v is very expensive in space right now. With orbital sources of propellant it doesn't have to be. That opens up the solar system, making it far cheaper to go anywhere, for probes, manned science missions, further more elaborate mining operations, etc. Moving stuff around in space would be easy. You'd enable a great big category of things we haven't done before because delta-v is expensive. If the Martian moons have accessible reserves of ice, they make for a very attractive source. Orbital mechanics are a funny thing: As it turns out delta-v to Deimos or Phobos is far less than dV to our own Moon. It takes more time to get there, but an unmanned craft needs no life support. The trip back takes more dV, but even then the full round trip is slightly less than a Lunar mission, and most importantly, with most of the dV being on the return trip you're able to use cheap propellant right from the source for it. Here's a worked example of how a 150 ton craft could bring 50 000 tons of water from the Martian moons to Earth orbit: http://www.neofuel.com/waterships/watership.htm This isn't the only way to go, and there may be better approaches, but it's a fine example. The economics of it are naturally the most speculative part. Elukka fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 08:38
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Tenzarin posted:No cool space stuff will ever happen in till some form of a space elevator is created and mastered, bottom line. Outside of anything that isn't some free energy gravity engine don't expect launching large ships from earth will ever be possible.
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Oct 20, 2014 11:45
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