12 hours ago, birdguy said:

It's not either or.  Of course what you mentioned are long term goals.  But there are re short term environoment and ecological goals right here on earth you space groupies seem to be ignoring.  You tell me we can do both at the same time.  Saving the endangered ocelot in Texas has a much lower priority than SpaceX in your minds.  Let the ocelot die out so we can mine asteroids 100 years from now.

Don't tell me we can do both at the same time because we are NOT doing both at the same time.  There doesn't seem to be a willingness to fund both at the same time which is why we let Musk's rockets destroy a National Wildlife Refuge while you cheer him on.

Noel

We are doing both. In fact, Musk himself has been doing both for years. He invested in Tesla as he thinks it's the right way to go for reducing pollution and eliminating the burning of fossil fuels for transportation.

Edited May 4, 20233 yr by goates

4 hours ago, martin-w said:

Nope, certainly not a century or more.

Yes, at least a century.  You talk about "off-world manufacturing" and "asteroid mining" as if 1)you know a lot about these things, and 2)as if they will become just routine activities in the near future.  I think that you allow yourself to be too easily influenced by cool Youtube videos.

In real life, just getting into orbit is a very difficult endeavor and very costly.  Just getting people to the moon, a mere 239,000 miles away, is proving to be a monumental task.  Getting people to Mars, about 40 million miles away at its closest point to earth and which only occurs every 2 years, will take at least another 10 years(and that's being optimistic), and the journey will take 6 months or more one way. 

Let's talk asteroids.  The closest edge of the asteroid belt to earth is over 100 million miles, more than twice the distance to Mars.  We're talking about a 1 year+ journey one way just to get there.  Then you have to have permanent habitations with all that that entails, then specialized space mining equipment which we haven't even conceived yet, then you have to actually mine the rock in a vacuum, then you have to transport the ore all the way back to the moon for processing(I'm guessing we'll have a moon base if we can mine asteroids), then you have to get all that heavy processed material back on terra firma which is no small feat in itself.  Now, please tell me again how would this be economically feasible?

I'm a huge fan of space technology and support funding for NASA, but I'm under no illusions as to what we can actually accomplish.  We have barely even dipped our toes into the ocean of space and we've been launching rockets for over 70 years.  Just consider what is being talked about here right now, IE finding suitable launch locations, and how difficult that is proving to be. 

Let's get real here.

Dave

27 minutes ago, goates said:

Fixed platforms probably are the better way to go for something large enough to support, and survive, a Starship launch

As far as I can tell, at 30 miles off South Padre Island, the depth is about 160ft. Assuming the sea bed is stable, would that be shallow enough to build a fixed platform?

I can't understand why Spacex would have bought these two platforms. They must have known beforehand they were floating and, therefore, unsuitable.

12 minutes ago, dmwalker said:

As far as I can tell, at 30 miles off South Padre Island, the depth is about 160ft. Assuming the sea bed is stable, would that be shallow enough to build a fixed platform?

I can't understand why Spacex would have bought these two platforms. They must have known beforehand they were floating and, therefore, unsuitable.

Fixed platforms can be setup in water much deeper than that. The Hibernia oil platform off Newfoundland is sitting in 80m of water, and there are many on the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico that are in far deeper waters than that.

https://www.offshore-technology.com/features/featureinto-the-abyss-the-worlds-deepest-offshore-oil-rigs/

They probably got a little ahead of themselves with the platforms they bought them. I don't think we think can say floating platforms are entirely unsuitable yet, just that those specific ones weren't. SpaceX said they wanted to better understand the needs of the Starship rocket before getting into figuring out how to do offshore launches.

Edited May 4, 20233 yr by goates

1 hour ago, goates said:

Those rigs may not have worked, but they don't seem to have given up on the idea. Fixed platforms probably are the better way to go for something large enough to support, and survive, a Starship launch. And I'm sure they do something like mount their steel plate, if it works, below the rocket to prevent it boiling the ocean beneath the platform (though I think the idea they would be boiling dolphins as one video mentioned is a bit over dramatic).

 

Yes, that's true. Gwynne Shotwell said that they hadn't completely given up on the idea. 

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

Now, please tell me again how would this be economically feasible?

The biggest barrier to all of that is the cost of getting off the planet. SpaceX has already significantly lowered the cost with their Falcon 9 and Heavy rockets, and will almost certainly do it again with Starship. So sure, it will be at least a few decades yet before things such as mining the asteroid belt is completely feasible, but I don't think it's really that far off into the future.

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

then you have to get all that heavy processed material back on terra firma which is no small feat in itself. 

I think the point of mining in space is to provide materials for manufacturing in space, things which will be used in space. There's no need to transport large volume metals like iron and nickel down to terra firma. We have enough here already. What would be transported down would be scarce commodities like rare earth elements.

I don't know if people would have to go to the asteroid belt. It would more likely be robotic spaceships which would bring small asteroids or chunks of larger asteroids back to a lunar orbit for processing.

30 minutes ago, goates said:

So sure, it will be at least a few decades yet before things such as mining the asteroid belt is completely feasible, but I don't think it's really that far off into the future.

I remember reading articles and books written in the 1950s that talked about how humans would be flying around the world in space planes and how we'd have moon bases by the end of the century.  It was so cool to imagine and fantasize about this stuff, but I was 12 years old and, well, didn't really know much about how the world actually works.  

If you believe that we'll be mining asteroids in 30 years then you're entitled to that opinion.  I wish that I could bet you a lot of money that it won't happen, but I may not be around to collect, so I'll just content myself with imagining how fun it would be to watch you hand over a large wad of cash to me 30 years from now.😁

This is the same sort of happy talk that I hear about some other subjects which are verboten here.  The good news is that the truth always reveals itself with time.  Reality has a way of destroying utopian fantasies.

Dave

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

Yes, at least a century.  You talk about "off-world manufacturing" and "asteroid mining" as if 1)you know a lot about these things, and 2)as if they will become just routine activities in the near future.  I think that you allow yourself to be too easily influenced by cool Youtube videos.

 

I was talking about the Moon as well as future asteroid mining. No, not 100 years at all. You underestimate the rate of technological progress. Look at the progress over the last 100 years. NASA are literally going to have to extract resources from the lunar surface/mine if they are to do what they say, have a long term presence. Mining the Moon itself will happen, and sooner than you think. A century is a very significant length of time in terms of technological progress. I would have thought you would have rated my intelligence as somewhat more than a person who is "influenced by YouTube". 

 

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

In real life, just getting into orbit is a very difficult endeavor and very costly.  Just getting people to the moon, a mere 239,000 miles away, is proving to be a monumental task.  Getting people to Mars, about 40 million miles away at its closest point to earth and which only occurs every 2 years, will take at least another 10 years(and that's being optimistic), and the journey will take 6 months or more one way. 

 

Read my pervious reply. NASA are building the infrastructure for a long term presence on the Moon. And no, its not proving to be a monumental task. This is happening, its not fantasy. There's a very good political incentive why this is happening that we can't talk about here. The Moon's gravity is only around 17% of the Earth's. Launching sizable payloads from the Moon rather than Earth is far easier task, and that's where any space mining activity (other than the Moon itself) will be launched from. .As for propulsion to get to Mars, as we speak, NASA and DARPA are working on Nuclear Thermal propulsion. Nuclear electric for an even shorter journey time to mars isn't too much further away either. There are also companies working on fusion propulsion, namely Pulsar Fusion in the UK. And fusion for propulsion is a easier task than fusion for energy generation.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-darpa-will-test-nuclear-engine-for-future-mars-missions

Maybe AstroForge, below, and its mining endeavor will fail... but they are indeed planning such activates now. And both missions on SpaceX rockets. 
 

Quote

 

Asteroid mining is back in the news. In January, California-based startup AstroForge announced that in 2023 it will lay the foundations to become the first commercial company to mine an asteroid and bring the materials back to Earth. Two missions launching in April and October 2023, both on SpaceX rockets, will test technology and survey a target asteroid.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/are-we-finally-on-the-cusp-of-commercial-asteroid-mining/#:~:text=In January%2C California-based startup,the materials back to Earth.

 

 

 

 

4 minutes ago, martin-w said:

Maybe AstroForge

Oh, sure.  I'll just bet that the big mining companies are heavily investing in this as we speak. 

This is just another startup money grab where the founders will pocket millions and leave naive investors penniless when it goes bankrupt in a few years, like so many other similar ventures in a sector that we can't discuss here.

Fusion propulsion?  We can't even build a tiny practical fusion reactor to make electricity here on earth which is desperately needed right now, at least in some places...

Pie in the sky.

Dave

 

" “If you find a large accessible metal-rich asteroid that you can keep going back to it over and over again, that would be enough,”

I wonder how you would put "dibs" on an asteroid.

24 minutes ago, martin-w said:

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/are-we-finally-on-the-cusp-of-commercial-asteroid-mining/#:~:text=In January%2C California-based startup,the materials back to Earth.

Also, isn't the asteroid belt orbiting around the sun. You would have to keep a track of your particular asteroid somehow. Maybe an Apple airtag or something.

Edited May 4, 20233 yr by dmwalker

14 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

I remember reading articles and books written in the 1950s that talked about how humans would be flying around the world in space planes and how we'd have moon bases by the end of the century.  It was so cool to imagine and fantasize about this stuff, but I was 12 years old and, well, didn't really know much about how the world actually works.  

If you believe that we'll be mining asteroids in 30 years then you're entitled to that opinion.  I wish that I could bet you a lot of money that it won't happen, but I may not be around to collect, so I'll just content myself with imagining how fun it would be to watch you hand over a large wad of cash to me 30 years from now.😁

 

Please specify exactly where I said we would be mining asteroids in 30 years? Straw-man arguments aren't really helpful at all.

In 30 years I do think we could have at least one, if not multiple, well established bases on the moon and be mining there. Mining asteroids certainly would be much further out than that, but I don't think under a century is that far fetched.

As for small fission or fusion reactors, pushing to develop them for use on the moon and Mars could be the drive that's needed to get them built down here too. Plenty of technologies came out of research and development on space programs.

 

Quote

This is the same sort of happy talk that I hear about some other subjects which are verboten here.  The good news is that the truth always reveals itself with time.  Reality has a way of destroying utopian fantasies.

If you want to let your pessimism drive your life, that's your choice. However, there is a middle ground between overly idealistic beliefs on the one end, and the doom and gloom some have fallen into on the other. I suspect the Wright brothers were more than a little optimistic when they designed and built their aircraft. Plenty of people doubted Musk and SpaceX when they started out, calling them fantasies. Now they have the most powerful rocket ever built. Reality has a way of proving pessimism wrong too.

15 minutes ago, goates said:

Please specify exactly where I said we would be mining asteroids in 30 years?

How much progress do you think we can make in 30 years?

Edited May 4, 20233 yr by dmwalker

3 minutes ago, dmwalker said:

Where do you hope we'll be in 30 years?

I would like to think we would have firmly established bases, if not outright self sustaining colonies, on the moon by then, and possibly have put people on Mars (though this will likely take longer). We have the technological ability for a moon base, and really have had for some time, it's really down to the will to make it happen, which I think we have now.

You are starting to go off course from the topic with space mining, etc!  Back on topic or it's a 🔒