I don’t picture asteroid mining looking like a factory clinging alongside a naked rock with probes digging into it. All kinds of crap will fly around and impede space travel.
It will be more like a big clamshell or bag engulfing the whole rock, which will be slowly heated up over time to extract volatile gasses. The frost scraped off the inside of the bag will consist of a specific gas or fluid depending on the controlled temperature. Eventually, the now-dry rock is slowly ground up from the outside, smelted, and centrifuges separate various metals by mass. Packages of semi-refined materials will be pressed together and scorched to give them a bit of a crust. These could be fired by linear accelerator, along with a tracking beacon, to wherever a customer resides.
Because interplanetary transportation tends to be either very costly, or take a very long time, space colonies and other constructions will simply be built right next to the source material, and will assume the former asteroid’s orbit. Every bit will be used, including a non-rotating outer shell made of slag to protect from radiation. The mining rig bag might be re-used as a mold for the colony itself. It would be like pulling a tent over a pile of material and building a house inside of it. The colony superstructure could be “printed” out of jets of hot metal or rock instead of assembled out of girders and sheet metal.
There’s enough material in Solar orbit to build millions of truly huge space colonies. This process would be mostly automated, with fine adjustments made by workers living in nearby established space colonies. It would be exponential, creating an immense inhabitable frontier for humankind to explore. In time, most humans will be living in space, with only a few tens of billions still living down on Earth.
“The US stock market closed at an all-time low today after a historic drop in gold. Analysts blame a nugget the size of a Volkswagen that entered the Earth’s atmosphere early this afternoon and turned the NYSE into a smoking crater.”
It is not now, and likely never will be, true that mining materials on asteroids for consumption on Earth makes economic sense. Not with today’s tech, nor with any currently-envisioned future tech.
Asteroids will initially be mined for materials needed by the cislunar/deepspace economies, where the huge costs of mining them in situ is less than transporting them up out of earth’s gravity well.
If you’re willing to pay vastly increased prices, you could conceivably move some environmentally troublesome or heavily polluting industries off-planet (that’s the vision that drives Blue Origin), but it’s likely you could devise less polluting systems on earth if you were willing to pay those sorts of order(s)-of-magnitude premium prices.
But as Elon Musk once remarked about Mars, if there were pallets of refined cocaine sitting on the surface of Mars, it wouldn’t make economic sense to transport it to Earth.
Same for asteroids.
Space is expensive. It’s getting cheaper, but it’s still just a reduction from unbelievably expensive to stupendously expensive.
I’m a huge space enthusiast, but frankly, asteroid mining to return precious minerals, rare earths and other materials to Earth is a pipe dream meant to bedazzle gullible investors.
Because asteroids are fragile crusts of dust and frost clumped together. Even if it were a solid lump, and they aren’t, it would be full of undiscovered cracks and flaws. You don’t want to hollow that out and try spinning it up.
Yeah, I love those illustrations, but the construction idea of nukes and steam is a smidge daft. Now imagine a colony which looked like that but had been hand-built from scratch using crushed and refined asteroid material, and then you got a deal. While plain rock doesn’t seem like an ideal material to put under rotating tension, it could be formulated like a ceramic to overcome this. Picture an eggshell enlarged a million times proportionately. It’s no longer “fragile” at that scale, and should be able to take pressure and spin for eternity.
ya, I sent that link to glenbank for the historical relevance, Dandridge Cole being an advocate of using asteroids directly as habitats…but this was 1960, I’m sure had he lived he would have refined his ideas. I think the present proponents of this idea, like Jeff Bezos, are motivated by the Gerard O’Neill vision, raw material for manufactured habitats (although Bezos casts asteroid mining as a way to collect resources for use on Earth)
As other people have noted, asteroids aren’t big solid rocks but collections of gravel loosely held together with gravity and electrostatic forces.
Your idea isn’t without merit. One of the more interesting ways of building a habitat/spacecraft is to launch a giant mirror made out of an extremely light material and some support structures. These would be anchored to a pole run through the middle of an iron rich asteroid and then pointed at the sun. As the surface of the asteroid absorbs solar radiation it heats up to the melting point, at which point you can slowly spin it like a giant roast chicken to evenly heat the whole asteroid. Once the rock is entirely melted you can inflate it using inert gas and temper with with cold gas or carbon heavy compounds depending on how hard you want it to be. Then flip the mirror over to the other side to reflect the sun away and let it cool down and solidify. Assuming we can work out the metallurgy in space issues it could be a very cheap but slow way of building megastructures.
If you leave the structure in a liquid state and spinning for some time the different metals and other debris should even separate into layers, at least what doesn’t form into alloys. Like I said, the details of the metallurgical processes involved may throw a huge monkeywrench into this scheme, but at least for now it seems possible and unlike most ideas possibly even practical given only slightly better technology than we have today.
Once you have your hollow iron sphere all you need is to bolt on a bunch of solar panels to the outside, orient the axis towards the sun, and drill some holes in the ends where you install the ingress/egress ports. Or maybe have those already pre-installed on that giant rod you shoved through the thing back in step 1. Maybe adjust the spin rate until you’re getting close to 1G on the surface, and presto, ready to go instant space colony, just add water (and dirt, and people, etc…).
Just dropping that much material out of orbit on the regular would obliterate the ozone layer in a few months. In “Metalliferous asteroids as potential sources of precious metals” Jeffrey Kargel theorized that delivering an equivalent amount of iron to half of the world’s consumption in 1977 (650,000 metric tons per day) would act like detonating a 10MT nuclear device in the upper atmosphere daily.
“Certainly much larger quantities of cosmic material than those considered by Gaffey and McCord [1977] have entered Earth’s atmosphere many times throughout geologic history: on average, one kilometer-sized object has entered every 250,000 years [Shoemaker et al., 1990]. However, NOx production caused by some of these events probably had catastrophic ecologic effects.”
Sure, this is going to be so great for a tiny handful of trillionaires who reap untold benefits from it. Humanity as a whole will benefit insofar as we’ll be able to look up and see their massive, futuristic, automated cities and orbital habitats, but 99.99% of us will remain stuck in the mud, fighting for scraps, dying of the latest pandemic (which will probably make COVID-19 look like the common cold).
I’m not particularly comforted by or excited about the likelihood of another round of sociopathic lottery winners who end up thinking they’re gods and geniuses. From Hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee, you rotten fucking bastards.
