There's also the huge engineering challenge of processing anything in space. Without gravity, you can't refine with the same methods we use here. All your storage tanks, pumps, etc would need to be designed from scratch to work in zero G.
It is idiocy from the word go. Like announcing an immediate bigfoot expedition to the moon to return the beast's hoard of gold.
US company aims to 'harvest' asteroidsUSA cannot manage even the ISS maintenance at the 220 km altitude... For what the asteroids should be good for?
There's also the huge engineering challenge of processing anything in space. Without gravity, you can't refine with the same methods we use here. All your storage tanks, pumps, etc would need to be designed from scratch to work in zero G.
USA cannot manage even the ISS maintenance at the 220 km altitude...
Maybe in the 22Th century asteroid mining will be economically wise.
Meanwhile, it's 10.000 times cheaper to mine earth resources.
Investors will be ripped of their resources.
Mr. Cameron, don't through your money away, please, use it to fund other wonderful movies
A US company said Tuesday it plans to send a fleet of spacecraft into the solar system to mine asteroids
"The company has developed a 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry that can transform raw asteroid material into complex metal parts. It is designed to operate in microgravity Earth-orbit conditions." From an article on telegraph.co.uk about the same topic.
The company has developed a 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry that can transform raw asteroid material into complex metal parts
because conventional tools will break down due to over heating, since you can't dissipate heat fast enough in vacuum to use conventional drills or cutting tools.
In order to produce enough power to operate a cutting laser large enough to be useful, they'd need nuclear power,
In the proposed design they need a source of molecularly pure nickel vapor. I wonder how they plan to get the nickel out of an asteroid?
I'll be impressed if they manage to drill sample cores and return them to Earth.
Quite simply, use a lot of huge lenses and mirrors and you can focus the energy of the Sun onto a very small area like a metallic asteroid. Spin it up a bit and given enough concentrated sunlight it will diffract itself into different layers for every metal which can then be extracted one layer at a time. Of course it sounds crazy but it's doable.
Maintenance in space is very slow and very, very costly.Maintenance in space will be done by robots and will be cheap as there is no gravity to work against.
It can take weeks, even months to get parts to the USA from Germany or Japan. Just imagine the lead time, and expense, from earth to space. That's a lot of down time.Space machines will be designed with massive redundancy, as the article implies. Most components and assemblies will be manufactured in totally automated facilities somewhere off-planet.
be4r
Jan 22, 2013