Logically and when future realities are considered there would be no reason for large craft to enter or exit our planets gravity at all. Shortly, mining, manufacture and use will mostly be done in space with limited transport to the surface required for even commerce.
Agreed! If the raw materials are available and there is 24*7 sunlight to provide power then building manufacturing plants in space will be cheaper and only the finished goods will need to be shipped back to Earth in what might even be disposable capsules. A factory in space won't be paying taxes or utility bills and if it is highly automated then it won't even need a large crew to operate either. Not only that but not having to worry about pollution or oxidization or any of the other issues that production facilities here on Earth have to contend with would make it a no brainer.
This will also allow for the inevitable colonization of space which is what WILL be happening relatively soon (beginning this century). When space station living is compared to even Mars (The easiest) there is no competition in every respect. The issues of gravity, environment, resources….etc....are all taken care of with existing technology and this will continue improving.
Large spacecraft holding 1000's of beings will surely use smaller craft to access the surface of a planet. How much gravity becomes an issue depends on the propulsion source...
Most likely I think we were talking about mining extraterrestrial bodies and using large craft to bring back the material. I just wanted to point out that, the trip into and out of Earth's gravity well will be incredibly expensive given known sources of energy, and that using large craft won't solve that. I proposed what someone called the "hairball" plan for reentry - spinning the ore into fibers so that the surface to volume ratio is better for dissipating reentry heat. That's not so good for humans, obviously!
I think it will be a long time before humans in space are that totally independent of earth for their needs. Until then, these spacemen will be needing our stuff and we'll be wanting to be paid by someone. And after then, I'll bet they'll want to buy our products.
yeah bringing back many tonnes of ore will a problem and expensive... hairball, hadn't heard of that before, it might work... I was thinking just drop it from orbit into an uninhabited area but that's very problematic and inefficient...
personally I don't think we'll ever get to that stage, humanity will have it's hands full dealing with the enormous financial and ecological costs of climate change...exploiting space will be on the back burner for a long time, if ever...just my opinion
I, too, think it will be a long time before we find enough reason to support more than a very few spacemen. For one thing, robots are getting better and humans are not. Given the incredible cost of humans, I'm not sure why I should believe that humans will be the economical solution.
You can buffer the front of the ship from burning up.....as long as you can make ceramics etc from the asteroid. Each asteroid will need to be able to supply multiples of ships to land on the earth. It has to be a lifting body and without knowing the numbers I suspect it will need wings it can deploy. When finished you scavenge the ship while building others on each asteroid. It could be more complicated as in having two asteroids to get enough the necessary materials to fashion a ship. It may take sophisticated orbits to get the asteroid in lunar, earth, or a higher orbit. How else are you going to get the asteroid onto the earth's surface?
whatever is being mined it needs to be some sort of uber valuable Unobtanium ore, the cost of bringing anything back in significant quantity is going to be horrendous
Scientists admit that the Em Drive isn't possible with today's technology and isn't feasible. While scientists are learning a lot about the universe with our telescopes and probes and exploring the possibility of warp travel they aren't even close to doing it and they admit it.
Not even that. Take advantage of relativistic speed and you could get a crew to Centauri in 5 months. Hell you do a round trip of the ****ing universe in just 50 years though everyone and eveything (including Sol) will be dead by the time you came home.
If you can attain the speed of light. That's the issue. According to Einstein that is impossible. Space warps and the like are so much wild arsed speculation backed up by some creative math.
Not really. A small rocket can alter the trajectory enough to cause the ore to change it's orbit to one where it it closer to the earth. Once nearer the earth it can be effectively smelted using electric smelting plants in space and then turned into ingots that other factories can convert into parts and or products. Bear in mind that there is unlimited sunlight and out in space there is no friction. All you are dealing with is gravity and outside the gravitational wells of planets it is not a significant problem either. A mountain of ore only has mass and inertia to overcome if you want to move it into another orbit.
When the supply of rare earths, silver, gold, He3, etc are scant, are needed by a country without them, and the cost/benefit ratio is favorable enough then it'll be looked at. China has most of the rare earths used in computing. Silver and gold are necessary currency and in industry. We don't have much titanium but you can mine that from the moon. Getting it to earth is not much different than asteroids. Some asteroids have huge quantities of premium metals.
The enormous difficulties involved in traveling such vastness, not to mention the cost, would seem to be prohibitive. Philosophically, there is little rationale to it as well. The existential questions and problems of life will not be answered thus.
technologically it may be possible but the economics of it all seem very questionable to me. rockets, inhospitable location, travel to and retrieval...it's not on the same cost scale as driving a big truck to a hole in the ground and bringing back the ore to processing plant...I'd think the resources on earth would need to be nearly depleted before space mining becomes financially feasible...
Not at all! We can remotely identify minerals and metal ores and then send robotic space vehicles to alter their trajectory to where we want them. Once they are in the near Earth orbit we can use robotic lasers to do the actual mining. Since the plants to process it will be in the same orbit the actual transportation of the mined ore can be handled by robot shuttles. Yes, there is an upfront cost and a certain degree of maintenance cost but on the other hand you save the cost of having to transport these minerals and metal ores from the Earth's surface into space which is massive if your goal is a habitable space colony orbiting the planet.
Its been a theme of lots of sci/fi books. I agree that "start up costs" would be exponentially greater than digging a hole in the ground, but the long term economic and environmental benefits are simply not comparative. ONe metallic M type asteroid could contain quadrillions of $$ of ore. That would be a tad "economically disruptive" to earth's economy. OTOH, imagine no more mining and abundant cheap metal from iron to precious metals to the rarest.
Musk has already shown the economic path and I find it likely he has plans already for eventual mining and growth of his foothold. I would not be caught of guard to see him begin implementation within a decade. Others such as Bigalow and Branson will also play a role.
Branson claims his direction is toward space tourism. Musk seems to be targeting the market for launching other people's stuff. I don't see anyone working on ways to bring significant payloads from higher than low earth orbit back to earth or how to mine asteroids. As I remember, NASA's 30 year plan doesn't include bringing anything back from Mars or more than a tiny sample from anywhere else. Asteroids are difficult objects, because they can travel rather fast, be far away, and/or have trajectories that do not match orbits that can be achieved without large use of propellants. I just think this is a distant futures thing. The timeframes for progress in space are excruciating.
