Planetary Resources Inc.

cIclops · 2012-04-21 06:19:23

This is my first ontopic post for some time and hopefully an interesting one ...

April 18, 2012
*** Media Alert *** Media Alert *** Media Alert ***
Space Exploration Company to Expand Earth's Resource Base
WHAT: Join visionary Peter H. Diamandis, M.D.; leading commercial space entrepreneur Eric Anderson; former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki; and planetary scientist & veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones, Ph.D. on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. PDT in Seattle, or via webcast, as they unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity.
Supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr., the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.

This new venture is called Planetary Resources, Inc.

Last edited by cIclops (2012-04-21 08:36:26)

louis · 2012-04-21 07:34:47

cIclops wrote:

This is my first ontopic post for some time and hopefully an interesting one ...
April 18, 2012
*** Media Alert *** Media Alert *** Media Alert ***
Space Exploration Company to Expand Earth's Resource Base
WHAT: Join visionary Peter H. Diamandis, M.D.; leading commercial space entrepreneur Eric Anderson; former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki; and planetary scientist & veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones, Ph.D. on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. PDT in Seattle, or via webcast, as they unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity.
Supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr., the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.
This new venture is called Planetary Resources, Inc.

It came up on another thread but deserves its own as this is potentially a v. important development. It's potentially an alternative source of funding for Space X for one thing.

This looks like a v. virtuous circle to me: funding from NASA to Space X, funding from PRI to Space X, missions to exploit tourism and other potential business opportunities.

I really think a Mars Mission is going to come much more quickly than people think. If Musk can crack the EDL problem then all systems are go.

cIclops · 2012-04-21 08:25:35

louis wrote:

It came up on another thread but deserves its own as this is potentially a v. important development. It's potentially an alternative source of funding for Space X for one thing.
This looks like a v. virtuous circle to me: funding from NASA to Space X, funding from PRI to Space X, missions to exploit tourism and other potential business opportunities.

Hi Louis!

It's still unclear exactly what Planetary Resources intend to do, but given their resources and skills this group could do impressive things in space.

Finance is coming from Larry Page and Eric Schmidt - note that Page has a net worth larger than NASA's budget!

Henry Perot Jr is a comfortable billionaire too and likes to fly helicopters around the world, maybe he wants to go faster with space adventurer and billionaire Charles Simonyi

James Cameron is the poor boy, but he's rich in marketing and movie skills.

Last edited by cIclops (2012-04-21 08:30:26)

louis · 2012-04-21 14:07:58

cIclops wrote:

louis wrote:
It came up on another thread but deserves its own as this is potentially a v. important development. It's potentially an alternative source of funding for Space X for one thing.
This looks like a v. virtuous circle to me: funding from NASA to Space X, funding from PRI to Space X, missions to exploit tourism and other potential business opportunities.
Hi Louis!
It's still unclear exactly what Planetary Resources intend to do, but given their resources and skills this group could do impressive things in space.
Finance is coming from Larry Page and Eric Schmidt - note that Page has a net worth larger than NASA's budget!
Henry Perot Jr is a comfortable billionaire too and likes to fly helicopters around the world, maybe he wants to go faster with space adventurer and billionaire Charles Simonyi
James Cameron is the poor boy, but he's rich in marketing and movie skills.

Although I would have preferred the first mission to Mars to be a tax-funded communal effort, a billionaires' pact could definitely see us there. And I'd prefer that to the mafia gangs ruling Russia and China getting there first.

It seems to me that PRI have the right skills set/interests as well as the right funds. They include some background in space tourism as well which I think will be key.

cIclops · 2012-04-24 23:09:12

Planetary Resources Inc gave a press conference yesterday.

They have an ambitious plan to develop and launch small spacecraft to search for asteroids, then visit and finally mine them primarily for water.

Details are sketchy as is the timeline, "end of decade to locate targets" and who will buy the "millions" of tons of water they apparently intend to produce. It was disappointing to hear their operations will be robotic. If they succeed they will create the first private space agency.

(Josh, please move this topic to the unmanned probes section)

Last edited by cIclops (2012-04-24 23:18:25)

RobS · 2012-04-25 10:31:14

I think their goals have to be vague at this time. It'll cost a few billion or so to send a person to an asteroid; robots are much cheaper. But it isn't clear robots have the skills needed. For that matter, it still isn't clear what skills are needed. Chondrite asteroids are basically highly diluted road tar; lots of silicates in a carbon-rich matrix. Extracting water from that is not easy in zero gee. Maybe a dead comet nucleus with real ice buried under the surface would be easier. Nickel-iron meteorites are enriched in platinum group metals, but some are very enriched and others only a little. If one could go out and find a 1-tonne nickel-iron fragment (which would be less than a meter in diameter; hard to spot) one could capture it and haul it back to earth safely. If you find a nicely enriched object 500 meters across, it may be hard to pull anything off of it. Maybe you could use electromagnets to anchor your robot, to give it enough downward "pull" so it could roll around the object on wheels, could pick up loose pieces and put them in a capsule for return to Earth. . . hard to say.

GW Johnson · 2012-04-25 16:44:05

Metals I understand. Some stony minerals might also prove useful, who knows yet? Water (and other volatiles like ammonia and CO2) I think vary very greatly from object to object, and are likely the "matrix" that sticks the sand, gravel, cobbles, and boulders together, sort of a natural "icecrete".

What we have been calling "asteroids" have lesser volatiles, what we have been calling "comets" have more, but I'd bet real money these are really just a spectrum of volatile content, not two distinct classes of objects. The drier ones are the really loose rubble piles.

I would think enclosing a small asteroid/comet object inside a pressure "shell" of some sort, rated in a dozen or so millibar pressure capability, and heating the body to the ice-melting point 0 deg C, would separate the metals and minerals as solids, and the volatiles as liquid water and gases. Spin the vessel a little to separate these materials centrifugally, and then pump the gases and liquids where you want them.

I'm wondering if the rings of Saturn might not be a happier hunting ground for volatiles, especially water. Does anybody know if we have a composition, and particle density, for any of those rings yet?

GW

Void · 2012-04-25 18:45:56

Various pre-positioned propulsion segments, to facilitate travel by spacecraft.

1) Solar Steam Rocket.
2) Burn as you split propulsion. In otherwords, with solar energy or nuclear energy, split the water into Hydrogen and Oxygen and do not store it cryrogenically, but only in pressurized containers, and when you have enough do a pulsed burn.
3) Store liquids, your Hydrogen Peroxide/Water solution for an Oxydizer, and perhaps Methane, if Carbon is available along with water.
4) Full Cryrogenic, Hydrogen and Oxygen stored liquid.

The idea I might see is they could gather the goodies, and even process them robotically and rather than returing that to Earth, pre-position them where travelers can latch on to them, and use them for their journey, and also for some extra consumables.

This could really open up Mars, and the real Asteroid belt.

After a tank like that was used, perhaps it would fly back to Earth orbit using electric propulsion, and be referbished for another mission.

Tanks could be loaded with water and prepositioned around Mars as well, if that technology did work because it should work for small objects near Mars as well shouldn't it?

If they could provide that for a Mars Mission, surely the sponsors of such a mission would pay rather well for the service.

And yes there are the valuable metals to bring home as well.

RobS · 2012-04-25 18:59:31

Saturn's rings are ices and astronomers probably have pretty good absorption and reflection spectra, but they are a long way away, and deep in a gravity well. The asteroids in the outer belt (or from the outer belt) formed pretty cold and probably have lots of ice. Ceres, in the middle of the belt, might possibly even have a liquid water "mantle" under a crust of ice and meteoritic debris. Phobos and Deimos might even have ice, though that's less likely.

The problem with enclosing an asteroid would be to make the enclosure airtight. If one were sure of its exact dimensions one probably could design and create a bubble on Earth that would fit over it. The problem then would be to make it airtight, and that would be difficult with our present technology, I suspect.

GW Johnson · 2012-04-26 09:34:00

I was just thinking of very little objects, a few meters or smaller. Things to enclose objects like that we can build, right now.

The Saturn rings idea: last I heard these particles were very small objects, like snowballs and snowflakes. It occurred to me that a very slightly elongated or inclined orbit might allow my "craft" to move into one of the rings and then out for a while, with a very slow relative velocity while in the ring: maybe 5-10 mph.

While in the ring, you scoop up material, and while outside the ring, you close the opening and process the captured material for the products, especially water. After you accumulate a bunch of water, it might be worth shipping inward toward, maybe, Mars. I was looking at the rings for a high yield of water, and very little of the solids.

Just a screwy idea.

GW

Terraformer · 2012-04-26 11:01:15

Eh? Isn't that rather like selling ice to Eskimo's? Water's pretty abundant in the solar system - even Mercury has some, and let's not forget Luna...

Which is why I'm confused by their plan to mine asteroids for water. Surely Luna would make more sense?

Decimator · 2012-04-26 11:55:20

Terraformer wrote:

Eh? Isn't that rather like selling ice to Eskimo's? Water's pretty abundant in the solar system - even Mercury has some, and let's not forget Luna...
Which is why I'm confused by their plan to mine asteroids for water. Surely Luna would make more sense?

Note that they're talking specifically about near-earth objects. According to some quick googling(I haven't run the numbers), these have a lower delta-v requirement than Luna does. There's also the thrust requirement, which is miniscule compared to Luna.

Also, ice may be abundant in the solar system, but it isn't where we need it. Consumable depots in Earth orbit would vastly reduce operating costs. If you don't have to tear all your fuel out of earth's gravity well, you can build considerably smaller rockets, with fewer stages and larger payloads.

Just a guess as to what they're planning.

Mark Friedenbach · 2012-04-26 15:09:08

Additionally Saturn is really, really far away. It took Cassini 7 years to get there from Earth, although that wasn't on a direct path. Anything in the outer solar system is a red herring to this discussion.

If we're talking about commercial operations, we must constrain ourselves to the inner solar system for probably the next fifty years in even the most optimistic scenario. We must be content to constrain ourselves to Venus, the Moon, Mars and the main belt (Venus is as far inwards as is worth going for resources, given the 13.1 km/s delta-v for a Mercury-Earth Hohmann transfer).

Of these locations there exists abundant water only on Earth (con: gravity well), Mars (con: significant infrastructure required and physical distance), the lunar poles (cons: significant infrastructure required and extreme environment), beyond the frost line in the main belt (con: physical and energetic distance), or in near-Earth objects, particularly the cores of recently extinct Earth-crossing comets.

From this standpoint, it's a no-brainer why Planetary Resources chose near-Earth objects for water prospecting. And as GW points out, extracting and purifying volatiles from such an object would be relatively easy with current technology. Indeed, enclosing a small asteroid with a shell is exactly what they are proposing.

EDIT: I don't think it's been mentioned here yet, but they've written up the approach they're using in a NASA report: Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study.

Last edited by Mark Friedenbach (2012-04-26 15:11:21)

GW Johnson · 2012-04-26 16:31:23

My idea about Saturn was to take advantage of mostly-pure water (as compared to very thinly-spread water on the moon and most NEO's), not much processing required if the "ore" is very rich. The capture and processing, as I described the very-slightly elliptical or inclined orbit, could be done automated. Even the shipment from Saturn could be done automated or by remote control.

Without men aboard, what difference does it make if the one way transit time is 5 years? Just ship a load out every few months, and a while later, start seeing shipments arrive every few months.

I know Saturn has a gravity well, so does Mars, the only other known source of high-purity ice off Earth.

What we're addressing here is the price of a gallon of clean water in LEO. With the shuttle, at $1.5B per launch to a max of 25 metric tons, and 8.34 pounds in a gallon, that was about $227,000/gallon from Earth. With Atlas-V 551/552 or Falcon-9 at about $2400-2500/pound, that's about $20,000/gallon from Earth. Projected with Falcon-Heavy at $800-1000/pound, it's about $7500/gallon from Earth.

Water from the moon, Mars, NEO's, or Saturn should be under about $7500/gallon "turnkey" delivered to LEO to be competitive, once Falcon-Heavy enters service the next year or so. I'd think that could be done in an automated fashion from any of those destinations, but I don't yet really know.

GW

Void · 2012-04-26 18:41:38

GW Johnson said:

Metals I understand. Some stony minerals might also prove useful, who knows yet? Water (and other volatiles like ammonia and CO2) I think vary very greatly from object to object, and are likely the "matrix" that sticks the sand, gravel, cobbles, and boulders together, sort of a natural "icecrete".
What we have been calling "asteroids" have lesser volatiles, what we have been calling "comets" have more, but I'd bet real money these are really just a spectrum of volatile content, not two distinct classes of objects. The drier ones are the really loose rubble piles.
I would think enclosing a small asteroid/comet object inside a pressure "shell" of some sort, rated in a dozen or so millibar pressure capability, and heating the body to the ice-melting point 0 deg C, would separate the metals and minerals as solids, and the volatiles as liquid water and gases. Spin the vessel a little to separate these materials centrifugally, and then pump the gases and liquids where you want them.
I'm wondering if the rings of Saturn might not be a happier hunting ground for volatiles, especially water. Does anybody know if we have a composition, and particle density, for any of those rings yet?
GW

Mark Friedenbach said:

If we're talking about commercial operations, we must constrain ourselves to the inner solar system for probably the next fifty years in even the most optimistic scenario. We must be content to constrain ourselves to Venus, the Moon, Mars and the main belt (Venus is as far inwards as is worth going for resources, given the 13.1 km/s delta-v for a Mercury-Earth Hohmann transfer).

I have been trying and trying to figure out what they plan to do, and finally I found some web information I like, and I will add some speculations, which are likely to be wrong, but perhaps they will cause someone else to come up with the right ideas.
The sites:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/scien … -belt.html

“There are probably about 1,500 near-Earth asteroids that are energetically easier to reach than the surface of the moon,” Mr. Anderson said.
Some of the asteroids are icy — up to 20 percent water — and the water could be drawn out by melting the ice. The water could be taken to supply stopovers for future astronauts or broken down into breathable oxygen or propellant for spacecraft on interplanetary missions.
Other asteroids are rocky and metallic. A throng of robotic mining spacecraft could grind up pieces of the asteroid and smelt it to capture precious metals within.

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/148648375.html

There are probably 1,500 asteroids that pass near Earth that would be good initial targets. They are at least 160 feet (50 meters) wide, and Anderson figures 10 percent have water and valuable minerals.

I am going to try to find one more item which says that out of 1,500 asteroids, 150 would be worth bothering with at first.

So, lots of Ice & hydrated and Carbonized materials? I was previously lead to believe that these were all dry bodies. Oh well.

So, here is my speculation.
1) Capture.
2) Grind inside of sack.
3) Separate materials.
4) Sinter segragates.
5) Capture and bottle volitile materials.
6) Deliver sintered items to various bidders/speculators/customers for further processing by them.
7) Keep platnum bearing sinter for special delivery to Earth.

Method of delivery of 7 to Earth could be.
A) Delivery vehicle, with heavy load, I presume you guys know what the limits are on practicality.
B) Deorbit and burn.
C) Parafoil to give some flight path? (Change that to weak guidance system of some kind).
D) Heat Shield remnant expelled in a safe location.
E) Explosive charge lowered on a tether.
F) At impact site guidance system drops load and saves iteself for reuse.
G) Special location is a bed of sand over a bed of solid rock.
H) Explosive charge hits first, and penetrates, expolodes and fluidizes the sand.
I) Heavy sinter chunk, "Splashes down".
J) Heavy sinter chunk impacts rock.
K) Heavy sinter chunk rebounds, shatters, etc.

Later Earth removers sift through the sand, guided by metal detectors.

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Building on those resources:

As per Mark Friedenbach

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Themis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65_Cybele

And of course Ceres and Vesta and so on.

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Building on those resources:

As per GW Johnson

That very elegant and brilliant plan for refiling from the rings of Saturn.

I guess it could take a long time to exploit the outer solar system, because there may be so much to get in the inner solar system, but perhaps that notion of refueling in the rings suggests a scout expidition or two or more. I am sure samples are desired from the Saturn system.

I am not a kiss up I just really like your innovation on this one. It never occurred to me ever, and likely never would.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I finally remembered the title of a book I read when I was very young. "Islands in Space".

Sort of a precursor to "The High Frontier".

In that book, it was suggested to inductively heat an Asteroid and inject liquid water into it to blow it up like making a blown glass item.
A hollow Asteroid.

Someone had rudely wrote "Planitoid Quackery" on that book.

But dreams have to start somewhere. The first, second, third offspring.............Eventually leads to a winner.

I am going to make myself scarce now.

Last edited by Void (2012-04-27 15:29:34)

Mark Friedenbach · 2012-04-27 11:08:53

Void wrote:

So, lots of Ice & hydradted and Carbonized materials? I was previously lead to believe that these were all dry bodies. Oh well.

Science of near-Earth objects is a quick-moving field; anything written in a book is almost certainly out of date. From our flybys of comets in the last few years we know that the ejecta plumes contain a lot of dust that rain back down on the core. The dust covers the comet core, insulating the inner materials from further sublimation. We've looked at these extinct comet cores from Earth before, and spectrographically they are devoid of volatiles. But again we have no way to measure anything more than the surface veneer, and dry material is exactly what we would expect of such an object. Presumably once you get just a few meters down however, you'd find an unspoiled comet core from beyond the frost line and rich in volatiles.

Void · 2012-04-27 15:45:58

Thanks for the info.

Since this is on topic more or less, and you guys would have high powered thinking as I might access, before I wander off (And I really do want to take a long break),
I have a notion, and some has already been mentioned, I would feedback both possitive and negitive on it. It is not that I think I have some wonderful new idea, it is that my internal knowledge is not sufficient to settle the questions, and some here might put some weight to it.

I mentioned a pulse rocket, I guess it could make sense if you split water that you had on board of a orbital rocket, and then wanted to burn it for propulsion. I presume pressurized storrage tanks, filled up and then a pulsed burn. (In this case the notion is that you would want to avoid the complications of storring cryrogenic fluids. The strength I see is that you can wait between pulses, and perhaps not need engines with an elaborate cooling system. (No channels with liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen). Of course those channels also serve to heat the burnable gasses, which I suppose might be wanted. The other deficiency might be that the thermal shock of a pulsed engine might fatigue the nozzle. Even so if humans wanted to manufacture rockets at remote locations where a reasonable energy source existed, and plenty of water, this rocket would be perhaps simple enough for them to manufacture off of Earth.

Plasma Engines as I have seen in the literature have had great advancement, they apparently have static Magnetic Nozzles? I am not sure but I believe that they typically do not handle water or Oxygen, but very likely might superheat Hydrogen to a plasma. I understand that Plasma is magnetic. However, the dynamics of magnetic plasma structure elude me. I do know that if plasma touches solid matter, or perhaps gas that is significantly colder, it will quench, and also very likely alter/damage a solid structure.

So, my weird question evolves to:
1) Can you generate a chemical burn pulse.
2) Can you then add energy by some means, to turn the tail end of that to plasma.
3) Can you eject the magnetic plasma using magnetic means. That is can you use an increasing magnetic repulsive pulse to push that magnetic plasma away even harder, therefore generating thrust.

Nozzle<Chemical Burn<Plasma Expansion<Magnetic Repulsion / Leaky Tokomack >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A sort of Plasma Ejecting Mass Driver.

It might help me to have a stronger mind for space propulsion if I know what my wrong thinking is in this matter.
Help would be appreciated.

Last edited by Void (2012-04-27 15:48:10)

Terraformer · 2012-04-27 16:50:16

Mmmm, sounds like a complex way to do things. I had a similar idea, though - use water to store energy gathered by a solar array as hydrogen and oxygen, and react them in a fuel cell to provide power for a pulsed VASIMR burn using them as reaction mass.

You wouldn't want to react the reaction mass together, because then you have to put in more energy to split them again.

Void · 2012-04-28 05:52:26

Well then pulse, is a mutual interest, and plasma, so plasma pulse.

I actually want to initially burn the Hydrogen & Oxygen, to provide a protection for the rocket nozzle. I believe, that magnetic fields are typcally imployed for that purpose as well, but if the pulsed burn is then further heated by other_means(), then the idea you expressed is quite similar.

However what I am really after is a Plasma Mass Driver.

Mass drivers to eject solid matter have been tried. But they would leave behind increasing navigation hazzards.

For some special missions, such as rare trips to places not in shipping lanes, this might be OK.

I have considered an Oxygen Mass Driver, using Paramagnetism, but frankly I am not capable of really knowing how to handle that. I just know that you can move liquid Oxygen with magnetism. An Oxygen Mass driver might make sense, if you have some rock which can simply be heated with solar heat to release Oxygen, and you liquified it. Or if you had a small amount of Hydrogen which you leveraged into a large amount of Oxygen, by Heating it with Oyxgenated rock to make water, and then split the water and reused the Hydrogen, until you had "Lost" it all. (Eventually you would loose the Hydrogen to the waste rock.

However, back to the Plasma Mass Driver.
In theory, a mass driver can approach the speed of light for ejection velocity. Of course, in fact your Mass Driver Machine will melt and/or explode, since it will always have practacticle mechanical limits, and a magnetic field pulse also will resist expanding and contracting over a certain speed and force.

However, with a Plasma Mass driver I would like to see a propulsion which would be even more powerful than just the notion of the expansion of a plasma out of a magnetic nozzle.

The complexity which I described is a natural result of trying to do something a first time (At least for myself).
First you try to accomplish something at all, then you try to make it elegant.

I guess I cannot think of any machine which would apply more linear energy to an atom/molecule than a plasma mass driver. So, I want one to drive my imaginary spaceship.

Entertainment.

Further notes:

-I also prefer a machine where if the magnetic/plasma propulsion fails, (Coils short out, or burn out, become unsafe to use), the machinery may in that situation still retain the ability to split water and do a chemical burn, perhaps a pulsed burn. To limp to a repair/rescue situation.

-A particle Accelerator might make matter move faster than a mass driver, or a super nova might, but they are too big to use in a spaceship, just yet.

-I was thinking of a repulsive magnetism, to push the plasma away, but of course the force of the field drops off quickly.
-Or a magnetic squeeze with a opening to squirt to plama out. Those devices that attempt to do fusion with a squeeze love to leak anyway.

This would be much more tough or impossible to accomplish:
-Now I am also thinking of a more typical mass driver. Perhaps plasma generated could be pulled along the sides of a ship. In that case, the rocket nozzles would be near the front, and would exhaust backwards, but then before the final exit the exhaust would be heated with a microwave pulse? Making the plasma magnetic, and therefore allowing it to be pulled by sequential electromagnets along the side of the ship. But then, that would be very hard to control, to keep the plasma from quenching on the materials of the ship. Perhaps if a stream of non plasma steam were traveling between the ships sides and the plasma, it would protect it?
Or in the outer solar system, could the ships sides be coated with a sacrifice material. Perhaps a combination of pulling and pushing coils, so that at one location the plasma is being pulled at an angle towards the ship, and at another being pushed away from the ship at an angle.

And I won't be surprised if someone says that this entity already did this, thing or that thing, as part of another thing and so on. That's fine. I want to know what the state of the art is.

We have a lot of black box people these days. When somewhat younger, I had to understand various descrete electronic components. Now, that is an outdated skill for the most part. I really don't expect that they put the same energy into training young people that any more than they train them for vacuum tube theory.

However, this tends to lead to a world of black box people. "Allakazam!" "Magic Carpet Rise!" So when people become too verbal, simply passing out buzz words, often the details are not obvious. How does the Magic Carpet fly? Alli Baba does not care. He only knows that it obeys him, and he might just get some of his archaic human compulsions satisified because he possesses a magic carpet. He thinks he can drop a rock on my head perhaps from his magic carpet. (If I was competition).

I want to know how to open the hood on the magic carpet, and exceed the verbalizers who's technology is to manipulate people for power. I want to understand the magic carpet beyond the level of verbal magical thinking.

Last edited by Void (2012-04-28 06:53:54)

GW Johnson · 2012-04-28 10:08:35

As I said earlier, for some decades yet, the whole thing about space resources centers around LEO. What is the price of a gallon of clean water in LEO? (Or the price of any other commodity in LEO.) I gave some data in an earlier post for the delivery cost of water to LEO.

That brings up total cost: there are two components to it. One is the delivery or transportation cost, for which we have pretty good figures Earth to LEO. Figures for transport from the moon or other places are more speculative, but are at least estimatable in ways we can at least debate. The other major cost item is processing/recovery costs on-site at the resource location. For water on Earth, in the industrialized countries, this cost is almost trivial at pennies per 1000 gallons, plus or minus. (Not so in the third world, lamentably, I might add.)

Here is where we have no data at all: what will it cost per unit of product to produce that product on the moon, Mars, an NEO, or anywhere else? Not only do we have no data, but also we don't yet even know how it can be done at all. Nor do we have a clue what the set-up costs will be, that have to be amortized over the (also still-unknown) life of the system. And, it's probably a completely different system at each different site, even on a single planet like Mars. Every site is different: you don't mine coal the same way in Wyoming that you do in West Virginia, for example.

That being said, it is still fruitful to dream up ways this task could be done. The ones that are simplest, with the smallest energy and effort inputs, and the smallest waste factors, are likely to be the least expensive ones. At least, that's been the history down here at home, so it's a good place to start.

Accordingly, I am concerned by proposals that might require enclosures of very large size that also have to input very large amounts of energy, as in capturing and "cooking" or "grinding" small asteroids. Enclosures like that are expensive to build, to launch, and to send to remote bodies. The power supplies for the proposed operations are even worse. Example: shuttle's 25 KW solar array was 65 feet long, several feet wide, heavy, and expensive. We might get 50 KW for the same costs today, but that's a far cry from the 10's to 100's of MW for melting rocks.

That's why I recommend looking first for really high-grade "ores", such as nearly-pure water ice, that would require very little quantity of nothing but low-grade heat at low temperatures to process the resource, at worst a bulldozer or backhoe to recover it (as on the moon or Mars), and a lightweight/low-pressure or otherwise "negligible" container for processing and transport. For example, ice can be shipped almost but not quite naked through space, and supplies its own structural strength to do so. This is highly to be desired. You just need a few millibars worth of containment pressure of water vapor to stop sublimation.

I looked first at ice because it is a source of water, oxygen, and hydrogen, things any human presence in space must have to survive. The two gases are propulsion energy even for a robotic presence. But, minerals and metals you have to look at in the very same way. Picking up iron meteorites on Mars might be a good way to accumulate that commodity. So would deflecting a nickel-iron asteroid into a suitable orbit.

The asteroids and comet cores will have some variable amount of volatiles (ice, ammonia, and CO2, largely), and a lot of stony solids. I doubt if most of these would be very rich in real metals of interest, like iron. As limited as we are for the next few decades, it's the very small ones we might process for products, limited primarily by launch of equipment from Earth (as we are). Very-thinly spread metals imbedded as part of the stony materials are not (yet) of much interest, as the yield is just too low for the processing effort, just like low-grade ores here on Earth.

I would look in some way inside these bodies for high ice content in an otherwise undifferentiated structure, in sizes under 50 meters. You enclose the thing gas-tight in a thin shell, apply solar heat, and melt the ice. The initial spin of the body becomes your enclosure's spin (how to practically achieve that I'm not yet sure). The atmosphere inside your enclosure becomes some fraction of an atmosphere's worth of ammonia and CO2 as the volatiles sublime. Inside the spinning enclosure, the ice liquifies to water and separates centrifugally from the stony particulate content. Your enclosure does need to be strong enough to take the "whacks" as the asteroid breaks up and its pieces fall radially outward under centrifugal force. No plastic films here!

You pump the now-clean layer of water to lightweight "tanks" and let it refreeze there. Compress, separate (not sure how), and store the ammonia and CO2 in gas bottles. Then bag up the stony particulates for shipment, if they represent something you can use. If there were iron, I doubt you could separate it magnetically, because nickel-iron isn't magnetic.

Done automated or by remote control from a practical distance without an hour's time delay 2-way, a rig like this could move from NEO to NEO and process them into usable products for several years. That's the kind of thing that just might be able to supply water to LEO for under $7500 per gallon. If we're lucky and we're good at designing this, the price might be well under $7500 per gallon in LEO.

The smarts for doing this does not lie within a government lab anywhere in the world, not NASA, nor any of the others, it lies within a visionary private group. The smarts for everything we ever did never lay within government labs, it was in the contractors and vendors they hired to do the job. Many of those have grown too large and stultified to qualify as visionary anymore. Truly visionary private groups are rare indeed. Spacex is one. The new asteroid mining venture (PRI) is another. The tourist space companies are some others. That's the fertile field you cultivate to get anything revolutionary done.

Ammonia and CO2 might not have much value in LEO. But for a colony or base on Mars, ammonia is a good fertilizer for crops, however they are grown. And compressed CO2 from an NEO might be cheaper and easier than trying to compress atmospheric CO2 from 7 mbar to 2000 psi. It's a different place; you have to think differently. As in a multi-way trade network among the several colonies we would like to plant eventually.

GW

Mark Friedenbach · 2012-04-28 10:30:06

Void, much of your concern over nozzle lifetime could be mitigated with an aerospike engine. It's getting a bit off-topic however, so I'd suggest splitting it into a new thread.

GW wrote:

Here is where we have no data at all: what will it cost per unit of product to produce that product on the moon, Mars, an NEO, or anywhere else? Not only do we have no data, but also we don't yet even know how it can be done at all. Nor do we have a clue what the set-up costs will be, that have to be amortized over the (also still-unknown) life of the system.

That's not true: there have been dozens of trade studies done inside and outside of NASA. There are some researchers whose professional career is built on in-space resource utilization and the difficulties therein. Aspects of the problem are still unsolved, but those issues are known and quantified.

Some other things to clarify... stony and stony-iron asteroids are (or often are) very valuable sources of rare elements, with much richer ore concentrations than you can find near the Earth's surface.

Otherwise I don't want to be raining on your parade; you've got some good suggestions.

Last edited by Mark Friedenbach (2012-04-28 10:30:36)

GW Johnson · 2012-04-28 14:15:47

Mark Friedenbach:

Thanks, Mark. I didn't know myself that anybody had seriously been looking at this NEO resource production cost issue. I'm an old guy (very old now), and I've not kept up very well with what's been going on in much detail. Old guys are like that, we're getting tired.

Be careful, though: I would say this about guys who "built their careers" on some technological item. We started "seriously looking" at scramjet propulsion ca. 1960, and many famous folks that I knew personally "built their careers" looking at it, without any significant success (and I do mean zero) until the USAF X-51 test very recently. That is over 50 years. (The NASA X-43A tests in 2004 do not count, being only 1-second burns after rocket boost to full speed, with no thermal energy balance, and no acceleration under airbreathing power.)

Point is, guys who "build careers" on a difficult problem actually have a vested interest in not solving said problem. I can say that with a lot of believability, because I'm just about the US's last living all-around expert in (subsonic-combustion) ramjet propulsion, and scramjet is something I kept up with long ago as a possible second specialty. This vested interest problem in scramjet is not any different in any of the other technology niches. Never has been. Never will be. Human nature.

I'm not so sanguine as you are about rare-earth ore concentrations in stony or metallic asteroids. This is all based on remote observation and (most significantly) inferred numbers. The actual history is that "ground truth" has always been vastly different than any of the remote observations ever led us to believe, for well over a century now.

There is also subsurface versus surface to consider. Few coal mines show high carbon concentrations on the surface for any kind of remote sensing to pick up. Same for oil. It really does take a deep drill rig or some equivalent thereof. And it will out in space, too. That’s also been the history of things. So, be very skeptical of anybody’s claims to “know” what’s really out there.

But, yes, it's well worth going to find out. It always has been, for well over half a millennium now. That’s another lesson from history. Knowing that, and actually believing in it, is a source of faith, I suppose.

Keep the faith....

GW

Rune · 2012-04-29 10:28:29

Hey guys! I have been away for while, but know I am always lurking somewhere not far away, and this Planetary Resources thing has inspired me, so here I am

One quick note before starting: the price for water you have established, based on Falcon Heavy launching it, is the price for anything, actually. Styrofoam for packaging food, or dirt, or toilet paper, or radiation shielding material (which asteroid rubble is very good for), would cost the same if they have to be lifted from earth. All you have to do is find a customer in orbit, and deliver it for less money.

The actual plan they are talking about implementing (basically just prospecting at this point, and quite remote and low cost at that) is not much to write about (though flooding LEO with cheap telescopes is a good, and necessary thing), but the intention behind it to seriously look at industrializing space is good to see any day. And there is some amount of real money behind it! Ok, not that much, but some.

Now onto how I would do it, which is always the fun part. Have you all read the paper Mark linked to? It's not actually done by Planetary Resources, but by a bunch of non-profit space advocacy groups, but it has surfaced with such good timing that you have to conclude there is some correlation. If you want to skip the read (an interesting one), I can just jump to the conclusions: you can launch in a Atlas V a probe, and ~5-10 years later said probe will deposit a ~500mT, ~7m diameter carbonaceous condrite rock into high lunar orbit, neatly packaged in a bag, de-spun, and with station-keeping capabilities courtesy of the probe. Bagged and tagged, right? Said rock is, more or less, about 40% volatiles (lets say half of that is water, the rest carbon-bearing volatiles and ammonia), 40% silicates and other "useless" rabble, and 20% metals, mostly nickel-iron. Wow, lots of stuff for a small rock, right? I mean, the rock wold fit in some living rooms I've seen.

Problem is, that is nowhere near enough to pay for the mission, even if the processing and delivery to customers was free. The paper assumes a cost of about 2.6 billion for the entire mission (just an atlas launch, but a lot of ground control and observation time with costly telescopes). Oh, and the tug's 13mT of Xenon propellant represents about 12 years of present-day production, I found out. Clearly unsustainable.

However, it would be a great practice run, and would yield tons of data about what is out there and how to process it. A good first step, and it actually yields usable material in a very accessible and safe place. Stuff lost/forgotten/discarded into high lunar orbit is eventually perturbed into the surface of the moon, not earth's. Even if there is no station at L1/2 to serve as "base-camp", any GEO launchers could reach it with meaningful payload, and a Falcon Heavy could put a Dragon there. Returning from there to LEO/earth is likewise easy-ish. And what have you left there of value? Well, 100mT of water for starters. And about 200mT of quite decent radiation shielding and soil matrix. It would actually make a lot of sense to do something like this just to build a decent, long-term manned station outside the Van Allen belts.

Seems to me those resources would enable subsequent asteroids to be captured and processed much more cheaply. First, the second generation of asteroid tugs, the guys that pick the rocks and bring them back, would likely be reused several times and fueled with "cost-free" water extracted from previous asteroids. And they would likely use volatiles produced in-situ as the reaction mass to tow the asteroids back in much more reasonable, but still multi-year, timelines, all robotically like the first one. Serviced at the lunar orbit end of their missions, the tugs cold last for a really long time. I mean, comsats already last routinely about 15 years without any servicing. Engines I don't know, from electrical solar powered arcjets working with hydrogen/water/ammonia to nuclear engines with the same propellants, to mass drivers using buckets and rubble and of course the usual crude chemical engines (which would consume a lot of the water to bring them back). Even ion engines, if you up the power levels significantly and solve the fuel problem. Hum. That gets me thinking... have I found a use for VASIMIR that actually makes sense? Can't be. In any case, whatever works best and you can use, both from an engineering, political, and economical standpoint. I would say arcjets can do quite decent in all those categories, but real analysis will figure that out.

More notes, as I come up with them: I think someone pointed out that using mass drivers could be a navigational hazard: it's more of a navigational hazard just being out of earth's atmosphere, and the rocks you are throwing out are going to be small and several km/s away from your orbit by definition, so no. Also, Void (it was you, right?), I think you have just re-invented magnetoplasmadynamic engines, or in general any other form of plasma engine, all of which would be more efficient that what you suggest, and could directly make the plasma from water without involving electrolysis or chemical engines. Low-thrust, though, and power-hungry. Think of them as multi-propellant ion engines, like solid NTR's are multi-propellant chemical engines: same order of magnitude but better isp, a bit lower thrust/weight, a lot more power involved.

Well, that's for fuel and logistics. The rest of the asteroid would be processed very close to home with reusable machinery in a, I guess, optionally manned station in L1/2 protected with free radiation shielding, kept there with free station keeping fuel, and supplied with free water and other volatiles (ammonia for the cooling systems, O2 for the crews, CO and other stuff for a variety of industrial processes). Imported solar power, machinery and everything else, of course. I'm doubtful on the usefulness of in-situ food production, it's such a small mass item compared with other stuff. All of that would cut the mass lifted from LEO to only space-rate hardware and crews, delivered to L1, and cut all subsequent mission costs for... well, everything, to a fraction of what they would otherwise be. Who knows, maybe the business case could even close right here if you find someone wanting to do something else in space (my first most radical and pie-in-the-sky choice, a space settlement UN agency ^_^) and he pays you for everything you are already producing to bring the asteroids home. It's certainly good to have a financially-solvent mid step, and preferably several along the way. Selling asteroid information and observational capabilities first, water and rocket fuel afterwards, satellite recovery and servicing, radiation protection...

And I haven't even started with metal refining! Probably that would take a much longer time to be established, surely that would need much more significant machinery to be placed and maintained at L1, and basically I leave it for the future to solve. As some vague directions, I guess fuel tanks, habitats, and solar power units would be the first things to be produced in space, in that order for reasons of complexity. Not much sense to ship back to earth anything other than science-relevant samples and maybe, in the very long run, the by-product Platinum-group metals and finished products. Got you all there, right? Platinum is the least important thing, IMO. In fact, by the time someone is doing all this, they are probably going for the big ones (>50m diameter) where it makes more sense to move your whole refinery there and ship stuff back. Presumably said refineries are mass-produced from standard templates at L1/2/4/5 from what has been learned in the previous decades. And we are definitely well into the later half of the century, too, and space is already a significant fraction of humanity's GDP and being "settled" by any measure you care to use. Here's hoping all that happens, and the faster the better.

So, to sum it all up, why the hell would you mine asteroids? In a phrase, to settle space for its own sake. Or put into other words, to build self-sustaining space colonies. I think that is worth it. And I think there must be some way you get someone (governments, corporations, the public, whomever) to pay for it. Who knows, in the long run they may even get a return on their investment, humanity for sure will.

Rune. I want to see a O'Neill cylinder being built!

Last edited by Rune (2012-04-29 10:30:13)

GW Johnson · 2012-04-29 15:11:44

Hi Rune!! How are you?

This asteroid mining stuff not only might be fun, it might even be practical. To see some billionaires pony-up to try it out is really encouraging.

I hope they visit sites like our forums. There's a lot of good ideas being bandied about here.

GW

Mark Friedenbach · 2012-04-29 17:34:57

Rune wrote:

Have you all read the paper Mark linked to? It's not actually done by Planetary Resources, but by a bunch of non-profit space advocacy groups, but it has surfaced with such good timing that you have to conclude there is some correlation.

Take a closer look at the names involved. It's a roll-call of PRI's known employee roster.

Also, the $2.4bn costing of the retrieval mission was by NASA costing standards. PRI has stated that they think that their unique operational structure and other cost savings could reduce that price tag by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude, putting it presumably between $24MM and $240MM, which seems more sustainable. No one outside of PRI knows if they can actually achieve that, but it's not impossible and it is what they claim.

It wasn't me that said it, but I'll concur that mass drivers are a severe navigational problem--the ejected masses would be large enough and moving fast enough to destroy any future space craft that crosses paths. It'd be a simple solution today, but certainly come back to bite us in the future.

Otherwise, great analysis. Have you submitted your resume to them yet?

Rune wrote:

Who knows, maybe the business case could even close right here if you find someone wanting to do something else in space... and he pays you for everything you are already producing to bring the asteroids home. It's certainly good to have a financially-solvent mid step, and preferably several along the way. Selling asteroid information and observational capabilities first, water and rocket fuel afterwards, satellite recovery and servicing, radiation protection...

That's more or less where I'm headed with my space startup, details to be made public within a year or so. What PRI needs is partners providing a market for first the data, then the actual extracted resources they will extract. The talk about platinum-group metals is really more PR, I think, as selling volatiles to space industry that doesn't exist yet is a bit too abstract that the moment.

I have said for a long time that the only thing holding back a true opening of the space frontier is 1) cheap access to space, and 2) in-situ resources once you get there. SpaceX & competitors are definitively solving #1, and if nothing else PRI is removing the giggle factor from asteroid mining, which solves #2. We are finally on the verge of a real entrepreneurial space frontier, and the accompanying gold rush.

Last edited by Mark Friedenbach (2012-04-29 17:37:45)

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